The coldest city on earth — minus 40 at breakfast, foal liver sashimi, and permafrost museums where woolly mammoths emerge from the ice
Yakutsk is the coldest major city on earth and the capital of the Sakha Republic — a city where January temperatures regularly reach -40°C to -50°C, where the ground has been permanently frozen for tens of thousands of years, where cars run 24 hours a day or their engines freeze solid, and where locals eat dishes adapted for extreme cold: fatty stroganina (raw frozen fish shaved into curls), foal liver served raw, and suorat (fermented mare's milk). The city sits on permafrost 300 metres deep; entire buildings rest on piles driven into the frozen ground because the heat of a building would th…
Yakutsk was founded as a Russian Cossack fortress in 1632 on the Lena River — the starting point for the Russian exploration of the entire northeast Pacific, including the expeditions of Vitus Bering (1728, 1741) that led to the discovery of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. The Sakha (Yakut) people, a Turkic-speaking people who herded horses and cattle on the subarctic steppe, had inhabited the region for centuries before Russian arrival. The discovery of diamonds in the Sakha Republic in 1954 transformed Yakutsk from a remote Siberian backwater into a strategically important city; the region…