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Balance 482

Designed by Phillip Berman, and naval architect Anton du Toit, the Balance 482 is a long distance performance cruiser, the smaller sister to the Balance 526. It’s another great design to come out of the South African ecosystem. Read our Leopard 42 review for another example.

With wave piercing bows, foam core hulls, decks and furniture, the Balance 486 is carbon reinforced, for rigidity and performance. There are options for dagger-boards or high performance fixed keels.

She is powered with a powerful 133 m2/1,432 square foot sail-plan, that keeps you sailing in light winds and is built to withstand a storm once you have shortened sail. That´s quite a bit more sail area to displacement compared to something like the Nautitech 44 Open and others.

The 486 comes with the famous Versa-Helm and built for short-handed and even single-handed sailing if needed. Her self-tacking solent makes tacking easy and all lines are led back tot the upper helm station. Dual furling headsails, electric winches, and a mainsheet system that operates without a traveler, all help to make this a comfortable boat to handle.

Layout Options

The Balance 482 comes with the following layouts:

• 3 cabin owners. Owner master berth starboard forward, owner master shower aft. Queen berth forward on port side with double bed aft. With a choice of one or two heads on port side.
• 3 cabin owner version with office to port. Owner master berth to starboard forward, owner master shower aft. Queen berth forward on port side, with single berth/office combination aft.
• 2 cabin double owner version, where both port and starboard hulls are private owner suites.
• Four cabin two head version

Balance 482 Boat Tour / Walkaround

Balance 482 Boat Tour off Port Ginesta in Spain

There wasn’t much wind! Thanks to Joe for showing me the ropes.

Launched Boats

482-01 Zephyr 482-02 inBalance

Balance 482 Polar Diagram

Balance 482 Polars (Velocity Performance Predictions -VPP’s), calculated using computer modelling at light ship weight in flat sea state, with trimmed sails and clean hulls. Polars only give an indication of sailing performance. In real world conditions, other factors are in play such as sea state, hull condition, payload, and the helmsman’s skill.

How much does a Balance 482 cost? What is the price of one of these catamarans? At time of publication, the base price for the Balance 482 starts at $1,081,599 FOB at their South African Factory. A fully cruise equipped yachts costs around $1,350,000 FOB at their South African Factory. That puts it in a similar price bracket to a Windelo 54 depending on options of course.

Technical Specification

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Finding Balance in High Performance

• By Tim Murphy
• August 22, 2022

Today’s rich market of cruising catamarans spans a broad spectrum from payload to performance. On the one side are boats whose credentials as well-appointed floating condominiums outshine their sailing performance; on the other are souped-up hull-flying speedsters with load cells and dump buttons more suited to a young, athletic professional crew than to the average cruising couple. 

For more than two decades, Phil Berman has sought to find a satisfying middle ground in the world of cruising catamarans. His latest offering, the Balance 482—with its downwind sail area of 2,900 square feet and a light-ship displacement of under 25,000 pounds on a 48-foot waterline—might not be the most extreme thoroughbred catamaran on the market, but it has power and sophistication, and a backstory worth understanding.

In 1999, Berman—Hobie Cat world champion of 1979, and a longtime sailor of cruising catamarans himself—founded the Multihull Company. Initially, it was a consulting service that served only as a buyer’s broker. Before long, though, he began taking listings on brokerage catamarans and hiring other brokers to serve a growing list of clients. 

Over the ensuing years, Berman ­attended hundreds of surveys and sea trials of catamarans built by every major yard around the world. Along the way, he developed strong perspectives on what worked and what didn’t, in both ­production and design.

“I’ve never been a fan of balsa core,” Berman says, “particularly balsa-core decks. No matter what happens, you’re inevitably going to have water incursion in any fitting that’s attached through the deck, especially hatches.”

The fabrication and installation of bulkheads always catch his attention: “I think bulkheads should be made out of composite material, not marine plywood.” He prefers bulkheads cut on CNC machines to close tolerances and entirely tabbed with fiberglass. “Bulkheads shouldn’t be moving or floating,” he says. “I’d go on surveys, and I could hear them moving. I’d lift up floorboards, and I could stick a finger between the bulkhead and the hull, and it would get crushed if I left it there too long.”

It wasn’t just catamaran ­construction that bothered Berman, but also sailing performance. His big epiphany came during the sea trial of a 50-something-foot French production cat off Palm Beach, Florida. 

“I was trying to go to windward in 17 knots of wind,” he says. “I couldn’t sail faster than 6½ knots, and I couldn’t point higher than 55 degrees. I just had this weird revelation: Like, man, we’ve lost the balance. And that was the day when I decided that I really ought to try to design a different kind of catamaran.”

Of course, not every catamaran he saw turned him off. For a few years in the early 2000s, he imported the French-built Switch 51. “I loved that boat in its day,” Berman says. “It was foam core with composite bulkheads, handmade foam-core furniture. It had nice living accommodations in the hulls, and it was physically attractive.” And it sailed well.

In the middle of the 2000s, Berman distributed Dolphin Catamarans, designed in France by Philippe Pouvreau and built in Brazil by Junior Pimenta. Those boats came close to the balance Berman was looking for, but they still had things he wanted to change. 

“I did some redesign on that boat, but the one thing I learned is that once you tool a boat, you can’t go back,” he says. “Changing tooling is so costly.”

From 2008 to 2011, Berman represented Catana in the United States. By then, he knew that in the cats that sailed well, daggerboards were a common denominator, not shallow-draft fixed keels. Still, there was one detail common to the French performance catamarans that irked him: “All the French thought you had to have two wheels out on each hull. That was the sporty way to go. But I always looked at it as an affectation, because if you’re voyaging, you’re not standing there or sitting there steering your boat; you’re on autopilot. But when you do have to steer your boat, when you have to come into a harbor, or if you’re daysailing, you have this massive exposure—either to the cold or the wet or the sun.”

Berman’s strong preference for true cruising cats was a single bulkhead-­mounted helm station. But even that idea had its problems. 

“What was really evident to me was that on smaller or medium-size boats, you had to pop up some kind of enclosure over it with isinglass for foul-weather sailing,” he says. “And it’s in the wrong place to be sailing because you’re higher up in the fulcrum, and you have to walk up and down there. Aesthetically, that’s a disaster. I like things to be clean and elegant, spare and unadorned. Understated is always better, you know?”

These were some of the ideas that Berman pulled together when he started Balance Catamarans a decade ago. In fall 2013, he brought the first of these cats to the US boat-show circuit: the Balance 451. Designed by Roger Hill in New Zealand and built by Lee Xiangong in China, the 451 exhibited some of the DNA we see in today’s Balance cats: slim hulls, wave-piercing bows, composite bulkheads, and foam-cored hulls, deck and hardtop. At the time, Cruising World ’s Boat of the Year judges saw a lot to like in that boat, but also saw evidence of a designer, builder, creator and boat owner from three continents pulling in different directions. “I would have done this differently,” was a common refrain we heard.

With the South African-built 526, Balance Catamarans hit its first home run in the eyes of the Boat of the Year judges— winning not only its category , but also the overall prize in the 2017 contest. 

“We’re not creating a charter cat, and we’re not creating a racing cat,” Berman said at the time. “We’re creating a high-performance cruising cat for a couple to sail on.” 

In the Balance 526, he had found the ideal middle path he’d been seeking all those years.

The Cape Town Connection

Evident in the Balance 526 was a wholesome partnership. To create that boat, Berman worked with builders and a designer who’d all grown up together in South Africa on the outskirts of Cape Town. Brothers Jonathan and Roger Paarman—world-class surfers and composites experts—and a couple of others had founded Nexus Yachts in Cape St. Francis in 2007. Before that, Jonathan had learned the composites trade by building surfboards and Hobie Cats in the 1970s, and then ran the factory floor for Voyage Yachts in the early 2000s. Over the years, Jonathan built Gunboats and other performance boats of carbon fiber and epoxy, including some that sailed in the Volvo Ocean Race. 

Designer Anton du Toit also came by his trade honestly, sailing around the world with his family for 14 years, beginning at age 13. Through those years, he worked in boatyards, getting to know boats from the bottom up. Later on back in Cape Town, he worked for designer Angelo Lavranos and boatbuilder Southern Wind.

A close look at the Balance 526 reveals multiple creators working together, and all pulling toward a single goal without clunky compromises. Around the time the first 526 hull was launched in 2015, Berman described the different build processes: “In China, Lee Xiangong builds our boats. Lee went to a university of boatbuilding, but he isn’t a lifelong sailor. Lee is going to do exactly what I tell him to do.” 

The result was that communication took longer, particularly when the New Zealand-based designer got looped in, and it took longer to finish any given project. 

Working with his South African ­partners was different. “Jonathan Paarman isn’t going to do exactly what he’s told to do,” Berman says. “If he thinks something is stupid, he’s going to let me know about it right away—because he’s a sailor. He intuitively knows.”

Clean lines are the defining trait of the Balance brand, beginning with the 526. For that model, Berman and du Toit started from the sailing performance they wanted the boat to achieve: steady speeds of 10 to 12 knots in ocean-cruising mode with a shorthanded crew (and with potential for higher speeds when pushed). The way to achieve that, they determined, was to keep the hulls’ beam-to-length ratio at 1-to-12. Other builders employ chines or bumps above the waterline to create more interior volume for wide fore and aft island berths in every stateroom, but the Balance team chose a form with clean lines that wouldn’t impede the flow of water over the hull. 

Trade-offs from the narrow hulls are evident in the raised athwartships king berths forward, as well as steps down into the hull that require you to start with your right foot as you descend. Boat of the Year judges found these to be elegant compromises in light of the boat’s exemplary sailing behavior.

Construction of the 526 is a sandwich of fiber over a core of closed-cell foam. The fibers are E-glass with carbon reinforcement in the high-load areas. Given that the cost of carbon fiber is several times that of fiberglass, this was a reasonable choice for a boat that isn’t intended to compete at the grand-prix level. 

That said, the resin throughout the boat is all epoxy—the best boatbuilding resin available. The cores are vacuum-bagged for thorough bonding throughout the structure; this includes such smaller parts as interior bulkheads and furniture. The result is a good blend of above-average strength-to-weight ratios and cost containment. 

It’s a boat that takes 25,000 labor-hours to build, nearly five times that of a similar-­size catamaran from a high-production builder. The Nexus yard has the capacity to build four 526s per year.

The 526 was the model in which Berman solved one of the catamaran ­market’s most vexing problems. What about the helm? On some cats, the helm exposes the sailor too much to the elements; on others, it isolates the helmsman from the rest of the crew, or it ­dangerously impedes visibility. 

The Balance’s Versahelm is a single articulating pedestal that can be pinned in different positions: up above the cabin top, with full view of the sail plan and in easy reach of all sailhandling controls; or down at the level of the cockpit sole, where the helmsperson has full protection from the elements, and full visibility through the saloon windows to all four corners of the boat.

The Balance 482, which debuted at the 2021 United States Sailboat Show in Annapolis, Maryland, is an entirely new boat that retains fundamental traits from the Balance 526, but it takes the ­cost-containment steps a bit further.

“The Balance 482 is a scaled-down version of the 526, but it’s a newly engineered and newly tooled boat,” Berman says. “We took all the learnings of the 526 and packed them into this boat. One goal of this boat was to find a way to bring the price down from the 526. This is a vinylester foam-core boat, whereas the 526 is an epoxy boat. And we’re using more molded parts. The 482 runs about $400,000 less than the 526.”

For the Balance 482 and a newer 44-footer set to debut in the US this fall, Balance is working with Cape Town builder Mark Delaney. He’s a second-­generation boatbuilder who studied marine technology in the United States and then returned to Cape Town to join his father in running Two Oceans Marine, which the elder Delaney founded in 1989 to build semiproduction power catamarans. Over the ensuing years, Two Oceans transitioned to building high-end custom powerboats and sailboats from 70 to 110 feet. Projects included sophisticated yachts built of carbon fiber and epoxy.

Working with Berman, Delaney started a new company called Balance Catamarans Cape Town to build the Balance 482 and Balance 442. “We’re gearing up to build 12 boats of each model a year,” Delaney says. “Eventually, 18 boats per year is where we’d like to get to.”

Delaney’s boatbuilding operation employs 400 staff and, with rare exceptions for specialized tasks, does everything in-house, including electrical systems, painting and interior furniture. Part of the cost-containment regimen for the 482 and 442 models is to use polyester and vinylester resin instead of epoxy, which is four times more expensive. But because Delaney’s production line is set up to build in epoxy, the yard is able to use some of those practices in the 482 and 442. 

Post-curing is also part of the build process, heating the composite parts after layup to mitigate print-through months and years down the road.

“We still post-cure the hulls like we would on epoxy boats just to try to help, because all these guys are painting their hulls,” he said. “It gives the boat a little more protection against the UV.” 

Delaney’s lamination team also takes the step of “thermoforming” the PVC foam core. The traditional method for making flat sheets of foam take the complex curves of a sailboat hull is to score the foam, leaving open channels called “kerfs,” which the resin then fills during layup. By contrast, thermoforming starts with uncut foam, to which the laminators apply heat to take the curves. Together with vacuum-bagging, this technique ­ensures a thorough bond between fiber and core without the added weight in resin to fill all the kerfs.

The result? “The sailing performance was excellent,” said 2022 Boat of the Year judge Gerry Douglas, “and the structure of the boat throughout was exemplary.”

Flattening the Learning Curve

This was the boat and these were the relationships Kevin and Sandy Hutton took on when they ordered Hull No. 1 of the Balance 482. In fact, in Kevin’s case, the relationship went back further than that—to the Southern California Hobie Cat circuit of the late 1970s.

“Phil Berman and I had a lot of parallels because he worked at Hobie Newport and I worked at Hobie Long Beach,” Kevin says. “I was the snotty kid looking up at the guy who was winning all the races.”

Sandy, a longtime powerboater, was no stranger to complex machines, but a performance cruising catamaran was new.

The couple brought different backgrounds to the process of learning to run the boat. Sandy had worked as a flight nurse and knew about the design of complex machines from her time at Bell Helicopters dealing with aircraft for medical evacuations. Kevin’s background was in emergency medicine and flight medicine; he and his brother and father had bought and restored a series of down-and-out sailboats, culminating with a Catalina 400 they owned for many years and sailed along the California coast. 

To learn the Balance 482, they hired Richard and Jessica Johnson, both licensed captains, former Sea Education Association instructors, and two-time circumnavigators. The four of them went sailing for a week this past winter, after the boat was shipped from Cape Town to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  

“It got off the ship on October 4, and we had to be in Annapolis for the boat show by October 12, so we power-sailed up the coast, and got there in four days and 17 hours,” Kevin says. 

They’d made it around Cape Hatteras just before a 60-knot blow that thrashed other boats making the same trip just behind them.

“We really shook her down,” Kevin says. “That was her first passage, and it was the roughest passage I think I’d ever sailed in. We came up the Chesapeake double-reefed and with the jib, and we were doing like 12 knots beating into the wind. It was lovely going—everything that was promised. It gave me a sense of confidence in the boat, knowing she could take that beating.”

Today, they’re relishing the relationships they made throughout the project of building the boat. “This all started just as COVID kicked in,” Kevin says. “We were all supposed to go to South Africa in August 2020. Everything had to shift to virtual. But I can’t say enough about Mark and his team, who really made it as seamless as you can. We got weekly reports. We’d schedule calls on Zoom or WhatsApp, and Mark would just be standing on our boat, walking us through it. So in some ways, we almost got to be more part of it.” 

Through their blog, they’ve gotten to know many of the other Balance owners.

I met Kevin and Sandy in the Bahamas this past February in the middle of their training week. For more than 20 years, Kevin has served as a physician at the all-volunteer medical clinic on Cat Cay, a private club. He now directs the clinic.

The Huttons had been sailing all night from Fort Lauderdale and hadn’t slept all day, instead using the daylight to practice anchoring and other techniques with the Johnsons. That night over a dinner of fish tacos, they were awake and alive and ebullient about the adventures and the community they were stepping into.

Sandy was still on her big learning curve, such as when she was on watch during the entry into Cat Cay harbor, being shown tips and techniques that included use of the chart plotter. Just as they approached the harbor entrance, she juiced the engine throttle.

“What are you doing?” the instructor asked.

“You said, ‘Zoom in,’” she replied.

Clearly, the Huttons are poised and ready to have some fun on the water. “I probably need a good solid year of getting comfortable,” Sandy says. “I think it’s just going to be a balance of how much time to be away from home, I can see myself wanting to spend more time on the boat.”

Specifications

484-413-2132 balancecatamarans.com

Tim Murphy, CW editor-at-large and longtime Boat of the Year judge, visited Nexus, Two Oceans and other South African boatyards in 2015. (See “Artisan Cats of South Africa,” July 2016.) He sails his 1988 Passport 40, Billy Pilgrim , on the US East Coast and in the Bahamas.

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Boat test: Balance 482 catamaran

In an ever more crowded multihull market, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. The Balance 482 has what it takes, as Sam Jefferson discovered

There was a time when, if you were searching for a cruising catamaran, your choices might end up being a bit limited – this is certainly not the case any more. Cruising multihulls are the fastest growing sector of the boatbuilding industry and the result is that there is now a vast range of boats to choose from.

An exploding market has also meant that designers are pushing the boundaries in many different ways in order to make their product stand out. Balance Catamarans is a fine example of this.

The South African company is the brainchild of its President, Phillip Berman, an American who set up the company in 2013. Berman, a former Hobie world champion racer, has written many books on multihull sailing in his time.

His years of both cruising and racing catamarans have given him very strong ideas about how a catamaran should be. As is so often the case, he found himself frustrated by what was available and, enlisting the help of designer Antoine du Toit, he set about drawing up the lines for what he saw as the perfect fast cruising catamaran.

The Balance brand was born and, yes, you may have noticed that it is a concept that treads heavily on the toes of bigger boatbuilders such as Outremer and Catana. If you’re going to go up against the big boys you therefore need to be armed with some original ideas to make you stand out from the crowd – and that is exactly what Balance aims to do.

All of which brings me to the Balance 482, the latest yacht, sitting between the 442 and 526 in its range.

The concept remains consistent throughout the range – fast cruising in style and the 482 certainly stays true to this.

The first thing you notice about the boat as you approach it is the style. Cruising multihulls can at times – let’s not mince our words here – be pretty damn ugly but that is not something I would level at the Balance 482. The looks are striking but pleasing with relatively slippery looking hulls tipped with dramatic wave piercing bows and a decent amount of reverse sheer.

The coachroof is harmoniously designed and sufficiently sleek to give the boat a racy, purposeful feel. It’s worth noting that the boat I tested did not feature the rather alarming paint job evident on the boat in the photoshoot, but was a somewhat less, ahem, exciting pastel blue colour.

As already noted, the Balance is conceived as a fast cruiser and, as such, weight is a relatively modest 11,500kg. Construction is in E-glass and vinylester with a PVC foam core and carbonfibre reinforcements in high-load areas. There is an option of stub keels or daggerboards – with daggerboards the option on the test boat.

The rig is aluminium as standard but can be upgraded to carbonfibre if you wish. The sail plan features a relatively generous (36.25sq m) self tacking jib and a powerful (94.47 sq m) main. It all adds up to a boat that promises to be fun to sail without being off the scale sporty.

Step aboard and you find yourself in a welcoming and roomy cockpit that feels very modern and stylish. The main a lounging area is to port and this doubles as the outdoor dining area, which could comfortably accommodate eight around the table.

There is a solid bimini providing shade and also the rather clever touch of storage for a couple of paddleboards. The cockpit feels nicely enclosed aft thanks to further seating, with davits for the dinghy aft of this.

The piece de resistance of the Balance is the triumph that is the Versadeck helm system. This is to starboard just abaft the deckhouse and is a means of getting around the age old problem of how to deal with the headache of where to put the helm on a cruising multihull. Raise the helm above cockpit level and you end up leaving the helmsman isolated and also have to make a separate bimini just for the helm – then you likely have to raise the boom.

If the helm is at cockpit level, then visibility can be restricted and it’s best to go with two helms situated outboard – but this leaves the helm exposed on a long passage.

Balance’s solution is a wheel that can be set in two different positions – one at cockpit level – which has access to all the instruments etc and one raised up to give excellent lines of vision and a good view of the sail. It’s a neat solution that I imagine will be imitated many times from now on.

In terms of sail controls, this is a yacht set up for short-handing and all the sail controls lead to three winches just in front of the helm with a bank of nine Spinlock jammers. In addition, there are two separate winches for the daggerboards.

Out on deck there is a handy grab handle recessed into the coachroof, which helps you feel secure and also doubles as a rain collector on long ocean passages – a thoughtful touch. The side decks feel broad and secure with a raised toe rail and really powerful non-skid making you feel exceptionally safe. Access to boom is good as it is very low and there is a good acreage of solar panels.

Step into the saloon through big patio doors and you find yourself in a space that is very white, light and welcoming. There is a galley with sink and cooker to starboard and twin banks of fridge/freezer to port. The galley has been carefully thought out with long distance cruising in mind, and there is a really good bracing position in galley with additional work surface and storage forward of the fridge.

It’s clear that this has been designed with the pitching motion of a catamaran in mind. Forward of this is a U-shaped seating area to starboard and chart table to port. There are also many, many USB ports. It’s worth noting that Balance takes a semi-custom approach to the interior so there is scope for changing to suit specific owner’s requirements.

Step downstairs into the starboard hull and you find yourself in the master cabin. This, again, is a bit different from most multihulls, largely because the large double berth is set forward with the bed set athwartships and raised up a couple of feet. This is essentially a way of gaining space; it’s raised up to create an island berth that straddles the nacelle to some extent and wins back otherwise dead space.

This is a clever touch and has a nice feel but being forward in a big sea high up makes you feel a bit vulnerable. Forward of this is a big storage area and aft is a huge shower room – possibly the biggest shower stall I’ve ever seen on any boat I’ve tested. You can have a sit down shower if you wish. The heads is forward of the shower and struck me as slightly awkwardly placed as it blocks access to shower a bit.

The corridor in between the master suite and the heads/shower room has all the switch panels etc plus a washing machine and the water maker, which are all well placed with excellent access. There is an option to have a more modest shower room and a double berth aft which is the layout that is used in the port hull

The port hull features a double berth aft with a second athwartships double forward. These two berths share a heads, which is set outboard just forward of the aft cabin and a shower room – more moderate than on the starboard side – which is set inboard just aft of the forward cabin, with shower just behind. As with the starboard hull, there is a lot of storage in the corridor between the two berths. There is an option to have both hulls set up like this, thereby gaining an extra double berth and losing a palatial shower room to starboard.

I tested the Balance off Castelldefels in Barcelona (not, alas, off Cape Town, where these shots were taken). I have test sailed many boats here and it’s rare you get a good breeze.

Yet, for once, the weather gods obliged and we had 20kts of wind on the day of the test with a bit of chop. The boat took it all in its stride and with full main and headsail we were soon making 7.6kts hard on the wind.

The Balance pointed impressively high – around 31 degrees off the wind in fact – and we kept pace with a 60ft monohull which was brand-new and out being tested at the same time. The helm position was a triumph. With the helm at cockpit level, you felt part of the action and there was good vision for watch keeping through the huge glass windows of the coachroof.

A sliding door leading to the upper helm position could be slid shut to further protect you from the elements. Meanwhile, with the helm in the raised position and Jefa cable steering also had very good feel. The boat was also good fun and inspired confidence. The sail controls were also thoughtfully placed and everything was made very simple by the self tacker, meaning you could throw the boat through tacks at will. Easing off the wind, we hit 8.6kts on a beam reach and 10kts on a broad reach.

Find out more at  balancecatamarans.com

This article first appeared in the March 2023 edition of Sailing Today with Yachts & Yachting. Buy a single issue or subscribe here .

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The bourgeois charm of Siberia's oil capital

If you’re driving west across Russia from the Pacific Ocean, the first thing that you notice upon entering the city of Tyumen is the McDonalds. Tyumen has long been one of the only Siberian cities with a McDonalds restaurant. Although the fast-food giant has plans to open locations in nearby Novosibirsk and other regional cities, Siberia still contains one of the longest distances on earth outside of Africa where you can remain on a major highway and not see a McDonalds. Until you reach Tyumen, that is.

A stop in Tyumen provides an interesting glimpse into how modern Russia’s oil revenue has influenced Siberia’s oldest Russian city. Tyumen is a great stopover point on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and a short ride from Yekaterinburg (five hours) or Tobolsk (four hours).

In the 16th century, Russia started expanding eastward into parts of Central Asia ruled by the Tatars, an Islamic people who still live thoughout Russia. A band of Cossacks wrested control of Tyumen from the Tatars in 1580. Six years later, Russians established a fort in Tyumen on the Tura River.

For centuries, Tyumen vied with the nearby city of Tobolsk—once the official capital of Siberia—for the prestige of the region’s most important city. Tyumen won in the end, when the Trans-Siberian Railroad bypassed Tobolsk and was routed through this now oil-rich city.

Tyumen played an important role in Russian history during times of war. At the beginning of the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik Red Army slowly pushed the White Army, commanded by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, into Siberia. Kolchak and his anti-Bolshevik forces holed up in Tyumen until the Red Army overtook them in January of 1918.

During the Second World War, many Russian industries were moved away from the front to Siberian cities. Tyumen had already become an industrial capital during the early Soviet era, and the city became an ideal spot to relocate Russia’s western factories. As Nazi forces approached Russia in 1941, the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin was sent from the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square by train to the Tyumen State Agricultural Academy for safekeeping. In 1945, Lenin’s body was shipped back to Moscow.

Some of the factories relocated to Tyumen during wartime remained in the city. The discovery of oil in the region catapulted Siberia’s oldest Russian settlement to further prosperity. Modern Tyumen is a vibrant city with a number of universities and a revamped center well-suited for exploration by foot.

Start your walking tour around central Tyumen on Ulitsa Respubliki. The city’s main drag has fine pedestrian walkways and leads wanderers past an impressive collection of tsarist-era buildings that recall Tyumen’s importance in the beginning of Russia’s colonization of Siberia.

From the southeastern end of Ul. Respubliki, head north toward the Tura River and take a brief side trip onto Ul. Ordzhonikidze to visit the Fine Arts Museum (47 Ul. Ordzhonikidze) which houses exhibits of classical Russian and Soviet art as well as traditional bone carving and works produced by the native people who live in the far north of Tyumen Oblast.

Back on Ul. Respubliki, you’ll soon see the city’s requisite Lenin statue by the local government buildings. A block away, opposite Lenin, is Tyumen’s city park, a delightful place to walk or hop on one of its amusement rides.

Most Siberian cities developed under the watchful eyes of the atheist Soviet regime and churches are usually not Siberia’s strongpoint. But this isn’t true in four-centuries-old Tyumen. Strolling up Ul. Respubliki, you’ll soon come to the Church of the Saviour (41 Ul. Lenina) and the Znamensky Cathedral (13 Ul. Semakova). Each of these stunning Baroque-influenced churches are located right off Ul. Respubliki and were built in the late 18th century.

Tyumen is also famous for its historic wooden houses. Heading further up Ul. Respubliki, stop to wander around some of the side streets and snap photos of these ornate wooden structures which provide a glimpse back in time. Near the Tura River, you’ll pass a civil war monument in remembrance of the Tyumen natives who died fighting the White Army and the Tyumen State Agricultural Academy (7 Ul. Respubliki) an impressive building in its own right where Lenin was stored during the Second World War.

Near the end of Ul. Respubliki, take a walk over the Tura River on the Lover’s Bridge, a suspension bridge open to foot traffic only that has become one of Tyumen’s iconic sights. The other side of the river is a great place to see more of Tyumen’s signature wooden houses as well as take in the churches scattered around the city center.

Save the best for last and visit the Trinity Monastery (10 Ul. Kommunisticheskaya) at the end of Ul. Respubliki. A white wall surrounds the monastery, giving it the appearance of a mini-kremlin, and the golden onion domes of the 18th century churches within should not be missed.

Although navigating Tyumen is straightforward enough, the St. Petersburg-based travel company OSTWEST can arrange a city tour in Tyumen and the surrounding countryside.

All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

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