The novel was banned in the Soviet Union, so David Lean could not shoot his epic there. Instead he built Moscow in a field outside Madrid, turned the pine woods of Soria into the Urals and sent a second crew to the snows of Finland.
The route follows the story in order, from the dam of the frame story to the ice palace at Varykino, and shows where each scene was really filmed. Most pins mark general areas, not exact camera spots.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Zone, a fenced-off wilderness where a guide takes a writer and a professor toward a Room said to grant wishes, was largely shot around Tallinn, Estonia, among abandoned hydropower plants, a power station and an old chemical works.
This route follows the film's story through those places: the factory and power plant seen before the Zone, the gate, the river plants where the journey was shot, a highway bridge and the power station that smokes behind the final homecoming. Exact spots are often unrecorded, so most pins are approximate.
Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin's Soviet Holmes and Watson were made when filming abroad was impossible, so a Riga lane became Baker Street, a Petersburg station became Victoria and a waterfall in Abkhazia became the Reichenbach Falls.
The route follows the Lenfilm television films of 1979 to 1986 from the Riga street with the screen 221b to Peterhof, Saint Petersburg, the Gega Waterfall and Tallinn.
Danila Bagrov comes home from the First Chechen War, goes to look for his older brother in Saint Petersburg and ends up a hitman by accident. In the sequel he is in Moscow and then Chicago, chasing the men who threaten a dead friend's twin brother.
The route follows Danila through Vitebsky Station, the Adamini House, a market and a cemetery in Petersburg, then Moscow and the American stops. Several stops are filming locations standing in for the story's places.
Georgiy Daneliya's 1964 comedy follows one day in the life of Kolya, a night-shift metro builder who cannot stop helping people, and Volodya, a young writer just arrived from Siberia. From a dog bite on a boulevard to a farewell on a metro platform, the two zigzag across Moscow with a wedding, a record shop and a chase through a park on the way.
The route follows the film in order through seven places, from Chistoprudny Boulevard to Universitet station. Some scenes were shot in a different street from the one the story names, and the text says where.
On New Year's Eve a Moscow surgeon goes to the bathhouse with his friends, wakes up in Leningrad and walks into a flat that looks exactly like his own. The Soviet classic that Russia still watches every 31 December starts as a joke about identical buildings and ends as a love story.
The route follows Zhenya's night from his new flat and the banya to the Leningrad airport, the identical building, and the station, then back to Moscow. The caveat: both the "Leningrad" and the "Moscow" houses were shot in the same Moscow district, and the story's street had been renamed years before.
On 19 October 1812 the Grande Armée walked out of Moscow after five weeks of occupation. Six weeks later, what was left of it scrambled across the Berezina on two hastily built bridges. In between lay a blocked road, a burning town, a depleted depot, a blizzard and a river full of ice.
The route follows six places on that march, from the mined Kremlin through Maloyaroslavets, Vyazma, Smolensk and Krasny to the crossing at Studienka. Most pins mark a town or village, not a battlefield.
Contains accounts of deaths in extreme cold.
In January 1959 a group of ten experienced hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute set out on a ski trek into the northern Urals. Nine never came back: they cut their way out of their tent on a mountain slope one February night and died in the snow, and the cause is still discussed.
This route follows the group from the institute in Sverdlovsk by train and lorry to the last village, then up to the mountain and the pass now named after them, and ends with the survivor's memorial. It sticks to the record; the explanations are left to the reader. The exact tent site is approximate.
On 12 April 1961 a pilot climbed into a small capsule on top of a rocket and became the first person in space. The flight lasted less than two hours; the road to it took a year of training, and the days after it turned a pilot into a worldwide celebrity.
This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
In 1466 or 1468 a merchant from Tver set out down the Volga to trade around the Caspian Sea. He was robbed on the way, crossed Persia, sailed from Hormuz to India and wrote down what he saw in A Journey Beyond the Three Seas.
This route follows him from Tver through Derbent, Hormuz and the coast of India to Bidar, and home to Caffa on the Black Sea. Dates are debated, and most stops are marked by area only because his notes name towns rather than buildings.
At 82, Leo Tolstoy slipped out of his house in the night, boarded a train with no destination in mind and was dead within ten days. The route follows that flight of November 1910, from his estate through two monasteries to a small railway station that suddenly drew the attention of the world.
It covers six stops in the Tula, Kaluga and Lipetsk regions. Three stops are approximate: two railway stations pinned by map search, and Astapovo, pinned on its village.
In the spring of 1890 the playwright and doctor Anton Chekhov left Moscow, crossed Siberia and sailed to Sakhalin, a convict island north of Japan, to count its inhabitants one by one. He kept the plan secret until January, travelled 82 days across Siberia, and came home months later by sea.
The route follows his way from his Moscow house through Tomsk, Irkutsk and the Amur to the penal posts of Sakhalin and back to Vladivostok. Several pins mark whole towns, because Chekhov's lodgings are not recorded.
In 1927 a former nobleman and a charming con man chase twelve dining chairs, one of them hiding family jewels, across the Soviet Union. Ilf and Petrov's comic novel follows them from a sleepy provincial town through Moscow and the Volga to the spa of Pyatigorsk, the Caucasus road and the Crimean coast.
The route marks six stops; Stargorod and Vasyuki are invented, so their pins are only candidate stand-ins.
Takumi Fujiwara delivers tofu every morning in his father's old Toyota AE86, and without knowing it he becomes the fastest downhill driver in Gunma. Shuichi Shigeno's street racing manga sends him against rival teams from mountain after mountain.
Some names are fictionalized, but all of the locations in the series are based on actual places in Japan. The route follows them from Mount Haruna, the real Akina, to Akagi, Myōgi and Irohazaka, then returns to the lake and to the museum that keeps the tofu shop's storefront.
Tokyo-3 is the fortress city of Neon Genesis Evangelion, home of NERV and the battleground against its monstrous enemies. It is fictional, but the series places it on the north shore of Lake Ashi near Sengokuhara, in Hakone, and the town has leaned into the connection ever since.
The route follows five real places where the series' scenes and stand-ins meet Hakone, from the Sengokuhara plain to the lake where Tokyo-3 drowns. The city never existed, so each pin marks a real stand-in.
Nioh sends William Adams, a blond outsider who becomes Ieyasu's ally, through a dark-fantasy version of 1600: demons in the mud of Japan's civil wars, alchemist Edward Kelley behind them, and Tokugawa Ieyasu rising above it all. Its story is stitched onto real places, from a London prison to the battlefield that made the Tokugawa shoguns.
The route follows the main campaign and its last two expansions: the Tower of London, Kyoto, Sekigahara, then the Sanada-maru, Tennōji and Osaka Castle. The game is fantasy, so the map shows where its history happened, not where it was filmed or modelled.
Agent 47 has killed his way across the world in the Hitman trilogy, from a Paris fashion show to a skyscraper in Dubai. Behind the levels stand real cities, a real tower and a few real places that inspired invented ones.
This route follows nine missions from the 2016 game to Hitman 3. Most venues are fictional, so the pins mark the city or the real place the designers named as a model, and each stop says which.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
Fionn mac Cumhaill is the hero of Irish legend who gained all knowledge by burning his thumb on a salmon, saved Tara from a fire-breather and, in folk tales, built the Giant's Causeway to reach a Scottish rival. His stories are tied to real hills, rivers and rocks, many of them still named for him.
The route follows his legend from the Boyne of his boyhood through Tara, the Hill of Allen, Slieve Gullion and Benbulben, then to the tall tales of Lough Neagh, the Causeway and Fingal's Cave. Nothing here is history: pins mark where tradition places each tale.
The greatest of the Icelandic sagas is a story of two friends, one famous for his strength and one for his wisdom, and of how a chain of insults, killings and neat legal settlements drags both families towards a night of fire. It is told almost entirely in real places in south and south-west Iceland.
The route runs from the national assembly at Þingvellir, where Gunnar meets his future wife, through Gunnar's farm at Hlíðarendi, an ice-bank leap on the Markarfljót and the Law Rock, to Njáll's farm at Bergþórshvoll. The saga names the farms, but not every exact spot, so some pins mark the area.
A baker's oven in Pudding Lane, a gale from the east and a city of timber and pitch: in four days in September 1666 the fire destroyed medieval London, including Old St Paul's. Samuel Pepys watched it from the Tower, from the river and from a church tower, and wrote it all down.
The route follows the fire from its first spark on Sunday morning to its end on Wednesday, then to the Monument and the Golden Boy that remember it. Where the sources give only an area, such as the refugee camps at Moorfields, the pin marks it loosely.
For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West.
The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.
In early 1965 Black residents of Selma, Alabama, backed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC, pressed for the right to vote. After a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in nearby Marion, activists called for a march to the state capital. Troopers stopped the first attempt on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 7 March; the third march, under federal protection, reached Montgomery on 25 March.
The route follows the marchers from Marion to Selma's Brown Chapel and the bridge, across Lowndes County's muddy campsites and the City of St. Jude to the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. The Voting Rights Act followed that summer. The farm campsites are not pinned exactly.
On the night of 14 April 1865 John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington and escaped on horseback. Lincoln died the next morning in a house across the street; Booth was hunted down twelve days later in a Virginia barn, in what was then the largest manhunt in US history.
The route follows both threads in turn: the theater and the room where Lincoln died, then Booth's road south through the Navy Yard Bridge, a Maryland tavern, a doctor's farmhouse and a swamp, to the farm where it ended.
