Mass Media Overview
Russia has its own Athens, Rome and Detroit... wait, WHAT? Athens-Cherepovets
14.07.2022 09:26
https://www.rbth.com
Lifestyle
July 01 2022
Photo: Cherepovets, 1840. Wladimir Kusnetzow / Russia in photo
“The famous city of Cherepovets or, simply put, Northern Athens… Here, people from different places of Novgorod and neighboring provinces come to study,” Russian economist Andrey Subbotin wrote in 1894. Indeed, ‘Northern Athens’ was the name of Cherepovets during the period when the mayor of the city was merchant and shipowner Ivan Andreevich Milyutin.
A commercial genius coming from a merchant family, he earned himself and his family hereditary nobility (a rare case for those times!). Ivan Milyutin received no formal education and taught himself all his life – perhaps that’s why he considered education the first necessity. Under him, seven female and male educational institutions were opened in Cherepovets, as well as a public library, a museum, a bookstore and a printing house. Cherepovets was then called not only the ‘Northern Athens’, but also the ‘Russian Oxford’.