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KITAI GOROD
This is one of the oldest historical districts of Moscow. It probably began to be settled in the eleventh century.
The most ancient part of Kitai Gorod, Zaryadye (the area where the Rossiya Hotel now stands) is on the left bank of the River Moskva to the east of the Kremlin.
Moscow Streets. Engraving from Olearius' book Voyages to Muscovy, Persia and India. After the painting of 1630s.
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It was along here that Moscow's first street called Great Street ran. It began by the Kremlin and went along the River Moskva, past the spot where the Rossiya Hotel now stands, finishing by the Church of the Conception of St. Anne, which is next to the Zaryadye Cinema.
The rebuilding of Moscow after the invasion of Khan Batu (1237-8) and the construction of first a white-stone, then a brick Kremlin led to the rapid growth of the merchants' and artisans' section. At the end of the fourteenth century Ivan III removed trading from the Kremlin to Kitai Gorod, thereby predetermining the boundaries of the Great Moscow Trading Settlement. It was during this period that the settlement's plan took shape for the most part, consisting of long streets joined by side alleys and crossroads where brisk trading took place. The first stone churches and houses also appeared.
The need to defend the now considerably larger town and the political influence which the Great Settlement had acquired demanded the construction of a fortified wall around Kitai Gorod, and the increased economic power of the Moscow princes made this possible. In 1535-8 the wall was erected under the guidance of the Italian master Petrok Maly.
Plan of Kitai Gorod. Engraving. Made on the order of the Polish King Sigismund.
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This new fortress met the requirements of the most advanced fortifications of the day and marked a new stage in the development of Russian fortified architecture. The Kitai Gorod walls were almost as long as those of the Kremlin (2,567 metres), but slightly lower and stronger. They were not more than nine metres high and six metres thick. The towers and walls were designed to take all types of artillery available at that time, from arquebuses to cannons. As well as loopholes in the lower and upper firing platforms, they had deep niches for setting up cannons not found in the Kremlin walls. The rectangular merlons defended a convenient platform of up to four metres, which was much wider than those in the Kremlin. The fortress was encircled by earthen bastions and a moat. The moat was filled with subsoil waters and had several weirs. In all the new fortress had fifteen towers and seven gates.
Apart from a section of the wall in Revolution Square and the tower in Teatralny Passage (by the Metropol Hotel), one more section of restored wall has survived in Ki-taisky Passage.
Scholars have produced several explanations for the derivation of the name Kitai Gorod. The most convincing suggests that it came from the word kita, meaning a wicker basket of twigs, which was used in building the walls to reinforce them.
Well fortified and situated right next to the Kremlin, Kitai Gorod began to attract the attention of the nobility close to the Tsar's court. Nor was it ignored by the rich merchants, who by the seventeenth century had acquired considerable power in the Russian state. A whole complex of trading courts was erected in Kitai Gorod.
Kitai Gorod also made an inestimable contribution to the development of Russian culture. The Slavonic-Graeco-Latin Theological Academy, the first Russian institution of higher learning, as well as Russia's first public library, first printing-press, first printed newspaper Vedomosti. first public theatre and, finally, first university were all set up here, in Kitai Gorod.
After the fire of Moscow in 1812 the buildings in Kitai Gorod acquired a classical appearance. Residential buildings gave way increasingly to public establishments. After the abolition of serfdom this part of the city became the business centre of Moscow. Classicism gave way to eclectics and new fashionable architectural tastes. Generally speaking, it is in this architectural form that is has come down to us now.
Today Kitai Gorod is part of the capital's public and administrative centre. At the same time it is one of the capital's most treasured preserves. The settlement's three main streets, Varvarka, llyinka and Nikolskaya streets, fan out from Red Square. They grew up on the routes of old roads and used to run up to the fortified gates in the Kitai Gorod wall. The specific location and historical development of each of these streets which linked the Kremlin with the eastern part of Moscow made them quite different from one another. We shall give a brief description of each of them.
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