Kolomenskoye

Interesting facts

Kolomenskoye is first recorded in 1339, in the will of the Moscow prince Ivan Kalita.

Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, was born in the Kolomenskoye palace in 1709.

The Church of St John the Baptist at nearby Dyakovo, built around 1547, may be the work of Postnik Yakovlev, one of the builders of St Basil's Cathedral.

The Iron Age hillfort at Dyakovo, inside the estate, gave its name to the Dyakovo culture of early peoples of central Russia.

Peter the Great's small 18th-century log house, brought from the banks of the Northern Dvina, now stands in the park.

Wooden monuments rescued from across Russia were moved here, including a tower of the Bratsk stockade from Siberia and a fortress tower from the White Sea coast.

The Golosov Ravine running through the estate holds springs and large boulders that local people have long revered as sacred stones.

An old oak grove on the estate includes one of the oldest oak trees in Moscow.

The estate covers about 390 hectares on the high banks of the Moskva River and became part of the city only in the 1960s.

In the Soviet years the restorer Pyotr Baranovsky led the effort to turn Kolomenskoye into a museum and gather endangered wooden buildings here.

Why it is worth it

Long before it became a royal residence, Kolomenskoye's name may have started with refugees. Local tradition holds that the village was founded by people fleeing Kolomna during the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, carrying the name of the town they had lost with them to their new home on the outskirts of Moscow.

The estate's most important building has nothing to do with that legend — it's the Church of the Ascension, raised in 1532 on the orders of Grand Prince Vasily III to celebrate the birth of his son, who would grow up to become Ivan the Terrible. It was the first tent-roofed stone church built in Russia, its architect an Italian master known locally as Petrok Maly, and its steep octagonal tower broke so completely from Byzantine church design that it set the template later echoed at St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1994, a distinction that sets it apart even within an estate that already carries its own federal heritage protection as a whole.

The other half of Kolomenskoye's story is a palace that no longer exists in its original form. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich built a wooden royal residence here in the 1660s so sprawling and ornately carved — roughly 250 interconnected rooms under a jumble of tented and onion-domed roofs — that visiting foreigners nicknamed it the Eighth Wonder of the World. His son Peter the Great spent stretches of his childhood in it, but had no attachment to the place once he founded St Petersburg and moved the court north; Catherine II found the ageing wooden maze so impractical that she had it demolished in 1768 rather than live in it. Because detailed plans survived, the Moscow city government was able to rebuild the palace from scratch on a nearby site, completing a full-scale reconstruction in 2010 — meaning today's version, however faithful, is a 21st-century replica standing near the original's actual foundations.

Getting there

Located in Kolomenskoye. Domodedovo International Airport (DME) is about 33 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Kolomenskoye is a former royal estate situated several kilometers to the southeast of the city center of Moscow, Russia, on the ancient road leading to the town of Kolomna. The 390 hectare scenic area overlooks the steep banks of the Moskva River. It became a part of Moscow in the 1960s.

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Kolomenskoye

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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From the encyclopaedia