With more then 1,160,000 inhabitants, Samara (known from 1935 to 1991 as Kuybyshev) is the sixth largest city in Russia and the administrative center of Samara Oblast, so, naturally, it has a intense cultural life. It has an opera and ballet theater, a philharmonic orchestra hall, and five drama theaters, all of them highly frequented by locals. The building of the Maxim Gorky Samara Academic Drama Theatre is the main feature of Chapaev's Square, on the Volga bank.
