Siberia’s Prison Castle turned into tourist hostel

A Siberian prison from the Tsarist era has been turned into a tourist hostel.

Tobolsk, Russia. Image by Sam Greenhalgh / CC BY 2.0

The notorious Prison Castle in Tobolsk was built at the turn of the 18th century and closed in 1989. It was a maximum-security jail from which nobody ever escaped, and had the Decembrists who revolted against Tsar Nicholas I among its prisoners. Famous novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky was also held there for ten days before his four-year exile in Omsk, while Tsar Nicholas II and his family were imprisoned there during the Bolshevik revolution before their execution in Yekaterinburg. In 1936–37 around 2500 political prisoners were executed at Prison Castle. There is now a museum dedicated to prisoners in Siberian gulags, and the hostel has rooms that used to be solitary confinement cells known as ‘sweat boxes’.

Read more: ibtimes.co.uk