Siberia's Paris — wooden lace mansions on the Angara, Lake Baikal a hour away, and omul fish smoked fresh at the world's deepest lake
Irkutsk is Siberia's largest and most historically significant city — the capital of the Trans-Siberian route and the gateway to Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake, which holds 20% of the planet's fresh surface water. The city is famous for its extraordinary collection of 19th-century wooden architecture: merchants and Decembrist exiles who settled here in the 1800s built elaborately carved timber houses (their decorative window surrounds nicknamed 'Siberian baroque') that have survived remarkably intact. The Decembrist revolt of 1825 sent dozens of aristocratic revolutionaries to Irkutsk…
Irkutsk was founded as a Cossack stockade in 1661 on the Angara River, downstream from where the river exits Lake Baikal — the most strategic position in Siberia for controlling trade between China and European Russia. The city grew rapidly after 1727 when the Kyakhta Treaty with China fixed the overland trade route through Irkutsk; by 1800 it was Russia's wealthiest city after Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Decembrist uprising of 1825 — Russia's first modern political revolution — sent many of its noble participants to exile in Irkutsk, where they built schools, hospitals, and a theatrical c…