Tula guarded Moscow's southern approach for 500 years, from the Vyatichi tribes and the 1380 Kulikovo battle to the 1941 siege that stopped Guderian's tanks. Its gunsmith quarters, Demidov crypt and Tolstoy's estate sit within 20 km.
Branch of the Kulikovo Field reserve in the 1898 Belolipetsky merchant house, Prospekt Lenina 47. Vyatichi burial finds, 14th-century armour and a working smithy where visitors forge a nail. Open 10:00-18:00, closed Mondays.
Built 1730-34 by Akinfy Demidov over his family crypt on Oruzheynaya 12. The lower church holds Nikita Demidov's cast-iron tombstone; the ironmaster who armed Peter the Great began as a Tula blacksmith on this street.
The wooden and brick lanes north of the Upa where Peter the Great settled state armourers in 1712. Walk Demidovskaya, Dulnaya and Oruzheynaya streets past forge courtyards, the 1870s Batashev samovar works and the Demidov monument.
Begun 1776 on the old plague cemetery hill and finished 1825 with a 82-metre bell tower visible across the city. Baroque-to-classical transition inside, with 19th-century merchant graves in the surrounding churchyard.
Opened 2020 in a restored merchant house on the old Pyatnitskaya trading street. Six halls trace Tula from provincial capital of 1777 through the 1917 arms strikes to Soviet industry, with reconstructed workshop and apartment interiors.
Three 40-metre steel bayonets and an eternal flame, unveiled 1968 for the 45-day siege of autumn 1941 when workers' regiments held Guderian's 2nd Panzer Army short of the city. A T-34 and Katyusha stand alongside.
Inside the still-working Oktava microphone plant on Kaminskogo 24. The Stanok museum tells Russian industrial history through lathes and presses, from Tula's 18th-century water-driven mills to Soviet five-year-plan factories.
The Upa waterfront was a closed arms-factory zone for 80 years until it reopened in 2018. It runs into Likerka Loft, the 1901 state vodka distillery now converted to bars, with the original brick warehouses intact.
Tolstoy was born here in 1828 and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the study. The house, Volkonsky wing, apple orchards and his unmarked grave in the Zakaz wood survive as he left them in 1910, 14 km south of Tula.
The Tolstoy family parish church 3 km from the estate, where the writer was baptised and married. His parents, brothers, wife Sofia Andreyevna and several children lie in the walled family plot behind the 1836 church.
The 1859 wooden family home of writer-doctor Vikenty Veresaev, who documented the Russo-Japanese War as a field surgeon. Preserved study, library and garden show how a Tula professional household lived around 1900.
Laid out in 1893 by sanitary doctor Pyotr Belousov, who turned the city's rubbish dumps into 143 hectares of woodland to fight cholera. The lime avenues, ponds and 1930s bandstand form Tula's oldest surviving public space.