The Romans named it Eboracum from a Celtic word meaning "place of yew trees," or possibly "property of a man called Eburos." When the Angles arrived in the fifth century, they misheard the first syllable as their word for boar and renamed the place Eoforwic, "boar town." The Vikings, sailing up the Ouse in 866 on All Saints' Day while most of York's leaders were in church, captured the city and shortened the cumbersome name to Jorvik. Norse settlers stayed, intermarried, and made Jorvik a bilingual city by the time the Normans arrived. The current name York is itself a thirteenth-century English reborrowing of the Norse form. Four civilizations, four names, and the same patch of marshy ground between two rivers. The yew trees, presumably, are long gone.

Under Viking rule, Jorvik became a trading hub linked to networks that reached the Persian Gulf. Archaeologists working the Coppergate excavations found workshops for textiles, metalwork, glass, and jewellery. The Norse coinage from the Jorvik mint circulated across the Danelaw, the swathe of northern and eastern England the Vikings controlled. At its peak, the city held more than 10,000 people, second only to London in Britain. Eric Bloodaxe, the last independent Viking king of Jorvik, was driven out in 954 by Eadred of Wessex. But the genetic and linguistic stamp of two centuries of Scandinavian settlement never fully washed out. Today's York Mystery Plays still get performed in the streets, the descendants of medieval traditions that took root in the bilingual city the Vikings made.

York Minster started as a wooden church built in 627 for the baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria. The stone replacement Edwin commissioned was finished after his death by his successor Oswald. The Normans burned that one down by accident in 1069 and replaced it with their own minster, which evolved across centuries into the Gothic cathedral that dominates the skyline today. Construction finally wrapped in 1472, four hundred years after Archbishop Thomas first started laying stones around 1080. Inside, the Minster serves as the seat of the Archbishop of York, third-highest office in the Church of England after the king and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Stand at the crossing, look up, and the central tower disappears into shadow. Walk the undercroft and you find Roman columns from the principia of the legionary fortress, still holding up the cathedral that holds up everything else.

York's medieval walls run just over two miles, thirteen feet high and six feet thick, the most extensive and best-preserved in the United Kingdom. The Shambles, a narrow street of timber-framed buildings whose upper storeys lean toward each other across the cobbles, dates mostly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was originally the butchers' street; meat hooks still survive on a few facades. In the nineteenth century, the Rowntree family launched a chocolate factory whose products became British household names: Kit-Kat, Aero, Smarties, Fruit Pastilles, Yorkie. The other big York chocolate house, Terry's, gave the world the Chocolate Orange. Both companies were Quaker enterprises, part of a religious community that has shaped York since the seventeenth century. The city's railway station, opened in the 1840s, made George Hudson briefly the most powerful man in British transport before he collapsed in financial scandal.

The city centre is compact enough to walk across in twenty minutes, but you can spend a week getting lost in it. Climb the wall circuit for views over rooftops and gardens. Drop into the Jorvik Viking Centre, built on the Coppergate dig that revealed the Norse city, and ride a slow car through reconstructed tenth-century streets. The National Railway Museum, opened in 1975, holds the Mallard, the steam locomotive that set the world rail speed record in 1938. The Yorkshire Museum, in the Museum Gardens, holds the Coppergate Helmet, Constantine the Great's marble head, and a passenger pigeon. If you want sleepy and atmospheric, go in November when the river fogs roll in and the streets empty after dark. If you want festivals, every season brings them: Viking, Roman, mystery plays, races, and the relentless cycle of Yorkshire pride.