Sviblovo Baroque and the church in Medvedkovo

⏱ 1 h 25 min🚶 2.5 km🍽 1📍 4 stops

🐢 A little — under 3 km

White carved decoration of Naryshkin Baroque, an estate on the high bank of the Yauza and 1.5 km along the embankment to a church with an old 18th–19th-century cemetery.

👶 With kids🏛 History and architecture🌳 Parks and nature🏘 Off the centre⏱ An hour or so

👶 7–12, 13+ years · ✓ stroller-friendly

Along Yauza Park there is an asphalt embankment. The descent from Sviblovo estate to the river is steep — go around along Lazorevy Proyezd. Sviblovo and Babushkinskaya have no lifts.

🗺 Open in Yandex Maps

1
🏛 Church of the Life-Giving Trinity in Sviblovo
Лазоревый пр., 15, стр. 3
An early-18th-century Baroque church built under Kirill Naryshkin for the Sviblovo estate.
Start at Sviblovo metro, 15–20 minutes on foot along Snezhnaya Street and Lazorevy Proyezd. Walk all the way round the church: white carved decoration of Naryshkin Baroque
📖 More about the placeCollapse
© Mike1979 Russia · CC BY-SA 3.0
© Mike1979 Russia · CC BY-SA 3.0
- The stone church is not the first on this spot: the Pleshcheyevs rebuilt a wooden church in 1622–1623 and 1677.
- Kirill Naryshkin added the bell tower in 1709, soon after the church itself was built.
- The church is the only fully preserved building of the Naryshkin estate of the early 18th century.
- The cross-shaped plan and window frames are still in the 17th-century spirit, while the crowning elements already show Petrine architectural methods.
- There is a version that the estate was built by Swedish prisoners after the Battle of Poltava and that one of the church's bells is a Swedish trophy.
- The church was closed in 1938, services resumed in 1995, and since 1994 it has been a Patriarchal Metochion.
- The church's comprehensive restoration was completed in February 2026.
🚶 on foot
2
🏛 Sviblovo estate
Лазоревый пр., 15
A small 18th-century estate with the Baroque Trinity church of 1708 and a main house on a slope.
The main house and wings on the high bank of the Yauza. You can usually walk through the grounds to the river
📖 More about the placeCollapse
© Mike1979 Russia · CC BY-SA 3.0
© Александр Сигачёв · CC0
- The village is first mentioned around 1417 in the will of Vasily I as the estate of the boyar Fyodor Sviblo, an associate of Dmitry Donskoy.
- In 1721 the court returned the estate to the Pleshcheyevs, and the offended Kirill Naryshkin carried everything out of it, down to the door handles.
- In 1723 the estate was rented by Duke Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp, son-in-law of Peter I.
- In 1801–1803 Nikolay Karamzin rented a dacha here with his young wife Elizaveta Protasova.
- The main house got its present look — a classical mansion with a colonnade and mezzanine — under the merchant Ivan Kozhevnikov, who bought the estate in 1821.
- The core of the main house is the ground floor of Naryshkin's chambers of 1709–1714.
- After the revolution the main house was turned into communal apartments for military personnel, which lasted until the 1980s.
🚶 on foot
3
☕️ Zdraste coffee shop on Selskokhozyaystvennaya · 🧸 play area
Сельскохозяйственная ул., 37
▮▮▯▯▯
A snack: cross the Yauza, take a raf coffee and syrniki to go, or have breakfast
🍴 A cozy neighborhood coffee shop by the Yauza where people have breakfast from morning till evening. What to order: syrniki (fried curd pancakes) with caramelized apples, draniki (potato pancakes) with trout, shakshuka, raf.
🚶 on foot
4
🏛 Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God in Medvedkovo
Заповедная ул., 52А, стр. 1
A tented church of 1634–1635 on the former estate of Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, on the Yauza bank at the mouth of the Chermyanka.
1.5 km north along the embankment of Yauza Park. By the church is an old cemetery with 18th–19th-century gravestones; nearby are excavations of the Pozharsky chambers
📖 More about the placeCollapse
© Gennady Grachev from Moscow, Russia · CC BY 2.0
- The church was conceived as a smaller version of the Intercession Cathedral on the Moat — St Basil's — and became one of Moscow's last single-tent churches.
- Before the stone building a wooden tented church stood here, for which Pozharsky cast a bell in memory of the liberation of Moscow from the Poles.
- The names of the first side chapels are linked to Novgorod, where Pozharsky served as governor in 1628–1630.
- In 1685 the village went to Prince Vasily Golitsyn, favorite of Tsarevna Sophia; at his order the iconostasis was made in 1687–1688 with the participation of Karp Zolotaryov.
- The church has never been closed — partly because in the 1930s Medvedkovo was not yet part of Moscow.
- The height of the tent equals the height of the entire lower part of the building — hence the feeling of a rapid ascent.
- In the 1970s the restoration was led by Nikolay Nedovich: the tent's late metal roof and windows were removed, restoring the church's original look.