Kostroma Plyos and Ivanovo Hills

The Volga at Plyos plus wooded rolling roads between historic towns.

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Why this ride

The Volga at Plyos plus wooded rolling roads between historic towns. The road: R132 and regional roads. Distance and riding time are estimates from the checkpoints until the road is measured on this page.

Roadbook

1. Kostroma start

   Kostroma sits where the Kostroma river joins the Volga, and its position at the confluence made it a significant town for nearly nine centuries. The founding is attributed to Yuri Dolgoruky in the twelfth century, and from the Middle Ages it was a prosperous trading town, famous for its linen and flax. The Volga here is wide and slow, with long sandbars, and the waterfront is lined with a tidy promenade where people stroll in the evenings.

   The great moment in Kostroma's history took place at the Ipatiev Monastery, a fortified complex with white walls and a tall bell tower on the river bank. In 1613 a delegation of nobles came here to ask the young Mikhail Romanov to accept the Russian crown, ending the Time of Troubles and starting the dynasty that ruled until 1917. The monastery is a vivid place, with a remarkable collection of old wooden buildings brought from the countryside gathered in an open-air museum nearby. The story of Ivan Susanin, a peasant who is said to have led a Polish force astray in the forest to protect the young tsar, is told in the town, and a statue of him stands in the main square.

   Kostroma is also the home of the Snow Maiden. The playwright Alexander Ostrovsky set his fairy tale play there, and the town has adopted the character, with a small themed house for visitors. The older streets are lined with merchants' houses, and the central square has a fire tower from the early nineteenth century in the style of a neoclassical lookout, reminding you of the dangers of a wooden town.

   The riding around Kostroma is mostly a matter of flat plains and slow river views. The road along the Volga to Plyos, a charming small town beloved by painters, is one of the best in the area, with views from the high bank over the river. Surfaces vary, and trucks, local buses and cattle are common on the smaller roads. In the summer there are plenty of mosquitoes near the water.

   The city has everything for the traveller, including fuel, repair shops and good places to eat. Local dishes include fish from the Volga and the cheese that gave Kostroma a reputation across the country. Evening light on the water is lovely, and the best seasons are late spring and early autumn.

2. Nerekhta stop

   Nerekhta is one of those small Russian towns that most travellers pass without noticing, which is a shame, because it is among the older places in this part of the country, mentioned in chronicles from the early thirteenth century. It sits on a small river of the same name in Kostroma Oblast, on the road and railway between Kostroma and Ivanovo, and has around twenty-five thousand people. Like several towns in the region it made its early fortune from salt, and later from linen weaving and trade.

   What you see when you ride in is a low town of brick merchant houses, wooden cottages with fretwork window frames, and an unusually large number of churches for its size, some restored and gleaming, others still waiting with grass growing from their cornices. There is no single grand monument, just a lot of layers: the trading rows near the centre, quiet lanes of timber houses, and a skyline punctuated by domes and bell towers. A slow loop around the centre on the bike, then a walk, gives the best sense of it.

   The riding on this stretch of the Kostroma and Ivanovo hills loop is easy-going. The land rises and falls in long, soft waves, mixed forest alternating with fields, and the main road is decent but busy with trucks. Side roads are narrower and rougher, sometimes with sudden broken patches or gravel sections that appear without warning, so it is worth keeping speed in hand on unfamiliar lanes. Late spring brings fresh green and cuckoo calls from the woods; September and early October are the golden season.

   For practical purposes Nerekhta is a reliable stop. Fuel stations sit on the approaches, there are grocery stores, a few cafes and canteens offering soup and buckwheat at modest prices, and the town is quiet enough to park without fuss. Kostroma is about forty kilometres north for a bigger choice of hotels and restaurants, and the Volga is close. Nerekhta does not try to impress anyone, which is precisely its charm: a real provincial town, still mostly lived in by people who work there, with its history standing around in plain sight.

3. Ivanovo stop

   Ivanovo has two nicknames that tell you most of its story. It was the Russian Manchester, because from the eighteenth century onward it became the great centre of textile production in the empire, a forest of chimneys and mills turning out printed cotton for the whole country. And it was the City of Brides, because those mills employed huge numbers of young women, and the gender balance of the town became a national joke and a song. Today it has around four hundred thousand people and still makes fabric, though far less than it used to.

   The town also holds a place in labour history. In 1905 the textile workers here went on a long strike and formed one of the first workers' councils in Russia, and the Soviet state later treated Ivanovo as a kind of proletarian shrine. Its architecture shows it: the city has a remarkable collection of 1920s and early 1930s constructivist buildings, including a long apartment block shaped like a ship and a curved housing complex locals call the Horseshoe. If you like the bold geometry of early Soviet design, Ivanovo is worth an hour's wandering.

   Riding into the city is less charming than the history. The approaches are wide arterial roads with traffic lights, trams, trolleybuses and a surface that varies from good to tired, and drivers move briskly. Once through, the country to the north toward Kostroma and Plyos is far gentler, with low hills, forest and the Volga waiting at Plyos, a small river town the painter Isaac Levitan made famous. That stretch is the reason this loop exists, and Ivanovo is the urban hinge of it.

   As a stop, this is where you deal with anything mechanical or practical. Fuel stations are everywhere, there are tyre shops and motorcycle dealers, supermarkets, and a full range of cafes, from canteens to modern coffee bars. It is a sensible place to sleep if Plyos is full on a summer weekend, which it often is. In the textile shops you can still buy printed cotton by the metre, and a couple of mill museums show the old machines and patterns that once clothed half of Russia.

4. Suzdal finish

   Suzdal is a small town on the Kamenka river, in the Russian heartland north-east of Moscow, and it is a place where the Russia of old churches and wooden houses survives almost whole. With a population of about eleven thousand, it has more than two dozen churches, five monasteries and a kremlin, all packed into a few square kilometres of low green meadows and willow-lined streams, and no factory chimney or tower block disturbs the skyline. The town was first mentioned in a chronicle of 1024, and for a time in the twelfth century it was the capital of the principality, until power shifted to Vladimir and later Moscow, leaving Suzdal a quiet backwater. That is exactly why it survived intact.

   The buildings are the draw. The Kremlin, a walled enclosure on a bend of the river, has the Nativity Cathedral, with blue domes dotted with gold stars and portals decorated in white stone carving from the thirteenth century. The Monastery of Saint Euthymius, which doubled as a prison for political prisoners under the Tsars, has high fortress walls and a bell tower that rings at noon. The Pokrovsky Convent, founded in the fourteenth century, was the place where Tsars sent unwanted wives. Together with the monuments of nearby Vladimir, the town has been on the UNESCO list since 1992. There is also an open-air museum of wooden architecture, with windmills and log churches moved here from surrounding villages, which is delightful in winter under snow.

   The local food and drink are an attraction in themselves. Suzdal is famous for its pickled cucumbers, celebrated in an annual festival, and for medovukha, a honey mead often served warm, along with horseradish and the thick sour cream of the region. Fresh bread and honey are sold in the market, and little restaurants serve hearty soups and dumplings.

   For riders, the roads around Suzdal are gentle, passing through flat farmland, birch and pine woods and villages with carved wooden window frames. The surface can be patchy, with potholes after winter, and the old road to Vladimir, about thirty-five kilometres away, is busy with lorries. Early summer and early autumn are the best seasons, with long light and the smell of hay or woodsmoke. Fuel is available in Suzdal and in Vladimir, which is the larger city, and it is wise to check the current situation for travel and fuel before planning a trip.

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