--:-- • --:--Пример экскурсии
Prechistenskaya Embankment next to Soymonovsky Proezd Street is worthy of special attention. In ancient times the enemy’s troops used to move on along the river banks. It was exactly this river bank that served as the way from Moscow to the West. In the C14th the duke of Lithuania names Olgerd together with his armed forces twice took this way to besiege Kremlin and both times took the same way back after ignominious defeats. Not long after that they built medieval defensive installations, namely dirt walls and ditches, all the way from here to Sretenskie Vorota Square along the modern Boulevard Ring.
During a long time the entire area of Chertolie – the valley of the Chertory Brook – was the place of Oprichnina, a special administrative elite under tsar Ivan the Terrible, something like secret police, created to protect the tsar and fight with enemies. When Oprichnina was abolished in 1572, the Alexeevsky Convent was built onsite the estates of distinguished Oprichniks, where today’s Soymonovsky Proezd Street crosses Prechistenskaya Embankment. The territory of the convent was enclosed by a wall, while along the river all the way until the Vodovzvodnaya Tower of Kremlin there were brick walls of the medieval fortress called Bely Gorod (“White Town”). There used to be a corner fortress tower called Alexeevskaya in the place where the embankment makes a turn, almost opposite the wooden church in honour of the Majestic Icon of the Mother of God installed the wall of the Bely Gorod. The Alexeevskaya Tower was very massive and very high. Its cannons could protect the entire area from today’s Krymsky Bridge to Kremlin. Onsite the park there used to be another tower, blind and low, which housed a church.
The Alexeevskaya tower that stood on the embankment in the C17th, had seven hipped roofs. Scientists know it because the tower was pictured this way on the plans of Moscow of those times. That’s why it was also called Semiverkhovaya (“Sem” is Russian for “seven”, while “verkh” means “top”). However it’s impossible to find out for sure what the proportions of the tower really were, as the cartography of those times was not very precise. Nevertheless, the image of the building has always excited the imagination of the artists in charge of historical reconstructions. That’s why painters Vasnetsov and Ryabkov depicted the tower as a truly fabulous building.
The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is a cathedral on the northern bank of the Moskva River, a few blocks southwest of the Kremlin. With an overall height of 103 metres it is the tallest Orthodox Christian church in the world.
The current church is the second to stand on this site. The original church, built during the 19th century, took more than 40 years to build. It was destroyed in 1931 during the Communist rule of Joseph Stalin. The demolition was supposed to make way for a colossal Palace of the Soviets that was never built, so the church was reconstructed in the 1990s on the same site.
The Cathedral is located on Volkhonka Street, which starts from Borovitskaya Square. The name of the street appeared at the end of the XVIII century when on the lands of the Volkonskis, a famous noble family was a popular tavern "Volkhonka". The street is one of the most ancient in Moscow. It was famous as a district for the rich.
This district is going to become Moscow Museum District. During the tour you will see and have the opportunity to visit a number of art museums: The Tsvetkovsky Gallery, The Ilya Glazunov Art Gallery, The Lopukhin Family Mansion (aka the Roerich Museum), Gallery of European and American Art of the C19th and C20th, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Private Collections. While walking here you will understand why Moscow used to be accepted as a beautiful jewelry box. In the lanes you will discover old mansions and fall in love with stories of Russian noble families. Such are The Golitsyn Mansion, The Lopukhin Family Mansion, Obolonsky's Mansion, Sergey Tretyakov's Mansion etc. The Chambers of Averky Kirillov - a unique example of a large urban homestead. Chambers, Church of St. Nicholas and outbuildings along the waterfront are a single architectural complex.
Another bright example of Moscow architecture is Pertsova's Rental Apartment Mansions. The house was an apartment house, located on the corner of Soymonovsky passage and Prechistenskaya embankment, built in 1905-1907 by architects N. Zhukov and B.N. Shnaubert on sketches of the artist S.V. Malyutin, author of Russian nesting dolls. The house includes apartments and artists' studios in the upper attic of the building.