About The City
Lucknow city is popularly known as the The City of Nawabs. Situated on the banks of the river Gomti, it is the capital of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
It was founded by Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula. In the olden times, it served as the capital of the nawabs of Awadh and it is one of the reasons why it is also called as the city of the Nawabs. The era of the Nawabs bestowed Lucknow with the courteous culture as well as mouthwatering delicacies for which it is famous today.
One of India's finest cities, Lucknow is north India's city of high culture, where the legendary etiquettes (adab and tehzeeb) is still a way of life. Under the rule of the Nawabs of Awadh, art, culture and cuisine flowered here.
Lucknow contains notable examples of architecture. The Great Imambara (1784) is a single-storied structure. The Rumi Darwaza, or Turkish Gate, was modeled (1784) after the Sublime Porte (Bab-iHümayun) in Istanbul. The best-preserved monument is the Residency (1800), the scene of the defense by British troops during the 1857 Mutiny. A memorial commemorating the Indians who died during the uprising was erected in 1957.
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Geography and climate
The Gomti River, Lucknow's chief geographical feature, meanders through the city and divides it into the Trans-Gomti and Cis-Gomti regions. Situated in the middle of the Indus-Gangetic Plain, the city is surrounded by rural towns and villages: the orchard town of Malihabad, Kakori, Mohanlal ganj, Gosainganj, Chinhat, and Itaunja. To the east lies Barabanki District, to the west Unnao District, to the south Raebareli District, while to the north lie the Sitapur and Hardoi Districts. Lucknow city is located in a seismic zone III.
Lucknow has a humid subtropical climate with cool, dry winters from mid-November to February and dry, hot summers from late March to June. The rainy season is from July to mid-September, when the city gets an average rainfall of 896.2 millimetres (35.28 in) from the south-west monsoon winds, and occasionally frontal rainfall will occur in January. In winter the maximum temperature is around 25 °C (77 °F) and the minimum is in the 3 °C (37 °F) to 7 °C (45 °F) range.[36] Fog is quite common from mid-December to late January. Occasionally, Lucknow experiences colder winter spells than places like Shimla and Mussoorie which are situated way high up in the Himalayas. In the extraordinary winter cold spell of 2012-13, Lucknow recorded temperatures below freezing point on 2 consecutive days and the minimum temperature hovered around freezing point for over a week. Summers are extremely hot with temperatures rising into the 40 °C (104 °F) to 45 °C (113 °F) range, the average highs being in the high of 30s (degree Celsius).