“Mega Tourism Caravan” arrived in Kazan
12 July 2013
The third stop of the caravan was at Ufa, the capital city of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia, and the industrial, economic, scientific and cultural center of the republic. The city began as a fortress built on the orders of Ivan the Terrible in 1574, and originally bore the name of the hill it stood on, Tura-Tau. It was granted town status in 1586 and by the 18th century evolved into a trading, manufacturing and cultural center of Southern Ural. After the outbreak of the Pugachec’s Rebellion, it went through the most brutal events in its early history; the fortress and the city were in the middle of the military actions. For several months during the winter of 1773–1774, Ufa was under siege by Cossack and Bashkir insurgents until they were fought off by the arrived government forces.
Before becoming the seat of a separate Uafa Governorate in 1781, the city, along with the rest of the Bashkir lands, was under the jurisdiction of the Orenberg governors. And even though the 1796 reform reunited Orenburg and Ufa again, in 1802 the city of Ufa became a new center of the entire Orenberg Governorate that included large territories of modern-day Republic of Bashkortostan, Orenberg Oblast and Chelyabinsk Oblast. During the 1800-1810s, Scottish Russian architect William Heste developed a general city plan for Ufa as a regional capital shaping the modern outline of its historical center.
On Friday, a very successful workshop was held at the ‘President Hotel’, in collaboration with ‘Russian Express’, a renowned tour operator in Russia. Russian Express Holding was founded in 1996 and has become one of the leaders of the Russian tourist business since that time. Besides sales-centers in Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and Yekaterinburg there Russian Express subsidiaries and representative offices in Izhevsk, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Rostov-on Don, Samara, Ufa and Chelyabinsk. Russian Express is one of the leading Russian tour operators which send Russian tourists abroad to more than fifty countries.
Addressing the audience of more than one hundred tour operators the Ambassador spoke about history, climatic conditions, major tourist attractions, major cities, visa procedures and recent infrastructure developments in the spheres’ of socio – economic and tourism of Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan Airlines and Russian Express also conducted presentations at the venue. The venue for Friday’s major event “The President Hotel” is the largest in Ufa, which has the most modern hotel room capacity among the hotels of its class in the Republic of Bashkortostan.
In the evening the Ambassador paid a courtesy call on Mr. Khamitov R. Zakievich, President of the Republic of Bashkortostan.
