Today was the big one: the Kremlin. We arrived just before opening and entry was pretty quick even though the line was longish.
The Armoury of the Kremlin was a manufacturer of arms, but also of exquisite decorative items, including embroidery. The Armoury Museum has the wealth of the tsars on display: lavishly decorated bible and icon covers, plate, armour, historical clothing (amazingly small corseted waists, Peter the Great’s caftans and pearl-covered patriarch robes) and an amazing room of state carriages. The Armoury has the best display of 16th century English silver in the world, as the English presented them to the czar and Oliver Cromwell melted down all the English plate. One case held imperial Faberge eggs: the first of which held a clockwork train set cast in gold. Poignantly, pictures of Nicholas II’s children were on two of them.
The church where the tsars were crowned is in amazing condition. The frescos are the original medieval ones: as the church wasn’t used except for coronations, they have not been harmed by outside air and candle smoke. Icons and decorations cover every surface. There are only four churches left of dozens that used to be in the Kremlin, as most were leveled to make way for Soviet buildings, including a gleaming Party assembly hall, which was used for a rock concert to mark the end of the Communist era.
We saw the bell that has never rung and the ‘cannon that has never been shot’, though forensic tests actually showed that it had fired shrapnel. Bells were cast for each successive czar on coronation.
After the Kremlin, we bought a ticket to go via the metro in our free afternoon to see the art nouveau Gorky House-Museum, which sounded fascinating. So we go through the turnstiles and I see a sign for the station we want, so follow the directions to find that we were standing on the actual station. So we continued out the opposite exit and arrived without entering a carriage. So much for my map reading and metro riding skills.
We settled by a statue of Gogol in a quiet, shady park to eat our packed lunch, scrounged at breakfast. Then we headed to the House Museum, of which I have no pictures (See Google search pix) but we did buy a little pamphlet. If you are ever in Moscow, go along. The house was built by wealthy Muscovites with a wide range of business and cultural interests in around 1902. The central staircase is sculpted stone in sinuous waves that twist up to the next floor, topped by a weird lamp that looks like a jelly fish. The lower entertaining rooms were absolutely exquisite, with large doors and high decorated ceilings. The large windows were each shaped differently and throughout was the most beautifully carved and finished woodwork. Even to the parquetry on the floor. Interesting details include double windows with about a foot of space between inside and out, and rails for drapes across the entrance and in doorways to save heat. The name comes from Maxim Gorky having lived there for about 5 years. His relatives continued to live there until the 1970s, during which time it was turned into a museum. I’ve not been in such a house before and loved its artistry.
After that we wandered a very up-market style neighbourhood in which Mum counted two Rolls Royces and numerous beemers etc. After failing to find the Museum of Modern Art – damned inaccurate map app - we wandered past Patriarch Ponds, one of the places featured in The Master and Margarita, and then failed to locate the Bulgakov House Museum, which also sounds fascinating.
So, back on the metro. On disembarking,
after walking for a while in the wrong direction, we found the boat again.
After all that we were quite knackered.
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