Krasnodar was Yekaterinodar until 1920 — a fortified Cossack camp founded on Catherine II's grant, then the White Army's capital during the Civil War. Its museums hold Scythian gold; its streets hold Soviet-era scars and rebuilt merchant facades.
Founded 1879 by Yevgeny Felitsyn, Russia's oldest museum in the North Caucasus. Halls cover Maikop culture bronzes, Meotian and Sarmatian burials, Bosporan Greek amphorae and Scythian goldwork from Kuban kurgans. Open Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, closed Mon.
The bend of the Kuban and Karasun rivers where the Cossacks laid out their 1793 kuren fortress — a square earthwork with 40 huts around a central square. Nothing above ground survives; a marker and the reconstructed fortress gate mark the spot.
A collection tracing edged weapons of the Caucasus frontier — shashka sabres, kindjal daggers, Circassian chainmail and flintlocks captured across the 1817–1864 Caucasian War. Labels are Russian-only; photography allowed without flash.
Built 1900–1914 to designs by Ivan Malgerb in Byzantine-Russian revival brick, with seven altars commemorating the imperial family's 1888 rail crash survival. It served as a grain store under the Soviets and escaped 1930s demolition.
Marks the site where the Nazi occupation of August 1942 – February 1943 used gas vans on roughly 13,000 residents. Krasnodar hosted the world's first war-crimes trial of Nazi collaborators in July 1943, two years before Nuremberg.
Mikhail Mikeshin's 1907 design showing Catherine holding the 1792 charter granting Kuban land to the Black Sea Cossacks. Melted down by the Bolsheviks in 1920, it was recast from archive drawings and re-erected in 2006.
Russia's oldest public art gallery in the North Caucasus, founded 1904 from Fyodor Kovalenko's private collection. Housed in the 1905 Art Nouveau Shardanov mansion; holds Russian avant-garde work plus icons and Kuban landscape painting.
A 1960s obelisk complex honouring the 12 February 1943 liberation of Krasnodar by the 46th Army. Veterans' names of Kuban units are cut into the surrounding slabs, and the honour guard of schoolchildren still forms on memorial dates.
The pre-revolutionary spine of Yekaterinodar, lined with brick merchant houses, the 1911 Winter Theatre and Art Nouveau apartment blocks by architects Kosyakin and Kozlov. Around 40% of the centre was destroyed in 1942–43 and rebuilt in Stalin Empire style.
The station area was the pivot of the Civil War in the Kuban: Kornilov's Volunteer Army launched the Ice March from here in February 1918 and died attacking the city in April. The city changed hands repeatedly until March 1920.
Home of the choir founded in 1811 by priest Kirill Rossinsky — one of Russia's oldest folk ensembles, disbanded by the Soviets in 1921 and revived in 1936 and again in 1971. Its archive preserves Kuban Cossack song notated in the 19th century.
The 19th-century settlement of non-Cossack inogorodnie migrants who had no land rights, laid out in low turluk-and-brick cottages east of the centre. Its grid of narrow streets still shows the class division that fed the Civil War in the Kuban.