Читать книгу The Most Detailed Travel Guide around Irkutsk. All the attractions with the route of movement & addresses - Alexander Dmitrievich Katashevtsev - Страница 11

We return to the State Bank building and turn right into a small lane, formerly called Bankovsky. The walls of a residential building built in 1938 for the employees of the Irkutsk branch of the StateBank of the USSR for 40 apartments are still rise here. On the other side of the alleyway there is another creation of the Soviet era – Hotel “Sibir”, built according to the design of K.W. Mital in 1933. Half of that building facing Lenin Street burned down in a severe fire on March 13, 1995.

Hotel “Sibir”

Today it is Kanazawa Street, named after the oldest sister city of Irkutsk (since 1967), the center of Ishikawa province in Japan. In memory of strong relations at the end of the lane a monument to Russian-Japanese ties which symbolizes a common undertakings was built in 1994.

Monument on Kanazawa Street

In total, Irkutsk has 15 twin towns, and the capital of Eastern Siberia was one of six places in the USSR, which were allowed to establish such relations with foreign cities.

The city has old ties with Japan. In the summer of 1783, the ship “Shinshu-Maru” of the Japanese captain Daikokuya Kodayu with 16 sailors, after six months of drifting ended up in the waters controlled by Russia. Wanting to return to their homeland the Japanese made a long journey from the Aleutian Islands to Irkutsk where they met Academician E.G. Laxman, who helped the five surviving sailors get an audience with Empress Catherine the Greatin in St. Petersburg. Only three returned to their native land in 1792, two remained as teachers of the first Japanese language school in Siberia. Thanks to the care for seafarers Russia received the right to enter one of the closed ports of Japan for the next few years. However, it was not possible to achieve a strong friendship then, but modern relations are already have a more than half a century of history.

E.G. Laxman on Japanese engravings