Good morning, dear friends! Staraja Russa: Why people boiled the water here Friends, Tuesday takes us to a city that owed its prosperity to an inconspicuous but once extremely valuable treasure—salt. Welcome to Staraja Russa, one of Russia’s oldest salt-boiling towns. The liquid gold of the Middle Ages While furs and wax were traded in other cities, a single resource made the difference in Staraja Russa: mineral-rich groundwater.