📍Bolshoye Maslennikovo, Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia
1937 – 1945“Valentina Tereshkova was born in March 1937 in Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a small village of wooden houses on the banks of the Volga in the Yaroslavl region, north-east of Moscow. Her father, Vladimir, was a tractor driver on the collective farm and her mother, Elena, worked on the farm too. She was the second of three children. Village life revolved around the river, the fields and the seasons, and the family kept a small plot to feed themselves. When she was two, her father was called up and was killed in the Winter War with Finland, leaving her mother to raise three children alone. The war years that followed were hard and hungry. In 1945 the family moved to the city of Yaroslavl, where her mother found work in a textile mill. Valentina started school late, at about eight, and left at sixteen to work, first in a tyre factory and then in the same textile mill as her mother, studying in the evenings to qualify as a technician. In her twenties she joined the local aviation club and made her first parachute jump, discovering a love of the sky. When the Soviet space programme sought women cosmonauts with parachuting experience, she was chosen, and in June 1963 she became the first woman in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times aboard Vostok 6. She often spoke of her mother's endurance and of her village childhood, and Yaroslavl has honoured her with a planetarium bearing her name.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons