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Walking routes in Moscow

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      Sokolinaya Gora: avant-garde, Iofan and modernism

      ⏱ 4 h🚶 5.7 km🍽 1📍 7 stops
      🚶 Moderate — 3–7 km

      A 1920s settlement of army commanders, a post-Constructivist cinema, towers by the architect of the House on the Embankment and the USSR computing centre — on the way to Izmailovo Park.

      🏛 History and architecture🎨 Art🏘 Off the centre
      🗺 Open in Yandex Maps
      1. 1
        🚶 Budyonovsky settlement (Budyonovsky Posyolok)
        Большая Почтовая ул., 18/20
        A block of red-brick houses of 1927–1929 for Red Army commanders (architect M. Motylev and colleagues): the curved street and courtyards of varied shapes survive almost unchanged.
        From Elektrozavodskaya metro, 15 minutes on foot. Walk along the curved internal road between the courtyards
        📖 More about the placeCollapse
        Budyonovsky settlement (Budyonovsky Posyolok)
        © Gennady Grachev from Moscow, Russia · CC BY 2.0
        • Along with Mikhail Motylev, the settlement was designed by Georgy Mapu, Alexander Fufayev and Maria Rusanova — one of the first Soviet women architects.
        • The curved street was no accident: the buildings get better sunlight, and the architecture unfolds as you walk.
        • The settlement had its own nursery, kindergarten, shops, club and library.
        • In 2012–2013 demolition was discussed: of 1,182 residents polled, 990 were against, and in May 2013 it was decided to preserve the settlement.
      2. 🚶 on foot
      3. 2
        🏛 Former Rodina cinema
        Семёновская пл., 5
        A post-constructivist landmark of the 1930s on Semyonovskaya Square; the cinema has been closed since 2020, and the building was restored to become a district center.
        A 1930s facade on Semyonovskaya Square — view from the outside
        📖 More about the placeCollapse
        Former Rodina cinema
        © Artyom Svetlov · CC BY 4.0
        Former Rodina cinema
        © Gennady Grachev from Moscow, Russia · CC BY 2.0
        • The cinema was built in 1934–1938 to a design by the architects Yakov Kornfeld and Viktor Kalmykov.
        • Cinemas in Tver, Smolensk and Simferopol were built to the same design, but Moscow's Rodina is the best preserved.
        • A second movie hall was planned on the roof, but a restaurant opened there instead and worked until the 1960s.
        • The roof was once topped with a sculpture, "Defender of the Far Eastern Borders" — the border guard Nikita Karatsupa; it has not survived.
        • The portal is decorated with ceramics showing a hammer and sickle, ears of wheat, stars and musical instruments.
        • In August 2003 the building was badly damaged by fire, and in 2007 it received protected status.
      4. 🚶 on foot
      5. 3
        ☕️ Madame Van café
        Щербаковская ул., 3
        ▮▮▯▯▯
        Lunch: tom yum with prawns or pho with duck; served quickly
        🍴 A Vietnamese café, modest from outside, by Semyonovskaya metro: rich soups and fast service. What to order: tom yum with shrimp, duck pho, wood ear mushroom salad.
      6. 🚶 on foot
      7. 4
        🏛 Iofan's buildings on Shcherbakovskaya
        Щербаковская ул., 5, 7, 9, 11
        Four 16-story buildings of 1962–1975 — a late work of Boris Iofan, architect of the House on the Embankment.
        Four late towers by Boris Iofan — compare them with his House on the Embankment
        📖 More about the placeCollapse
        Iofan's buildings on Shcherbakovskaya
        © Artyom Svetlov · CC BY 4.0
        • To Iofan's design, four 16-story single-section towers were built here — buildings No. 5, 7, 9 and 11.
        • Three towers are joined by a two-story podium more than 100 m long with shops, and beneath it, below the sidewalk, runs a through road for trucks.
        • The towers stand 47 m apart — this violated sunlight norms, and the distance was tested on a model under an "artificial sun".
        • The kitchens here are big for the 1960s — up to 14.1 m²: the authors conceived them as kitchen-dining rooms, so that bedrooms would be only for sleeping.
        • Construction dragged on for 13 years and finished in 1975 — a year before Iofan's death.
        • Iofan had promoted freestanding single-section buildings since the start of the panel-building era; at first the idea was not supported.
      8. 🚶 on foot
      9. 5
        🏛 Church of St Demetrius of Thessalonica in Blagusha
        ул. Ибрагимова, 6А
        A brick church in the Russian style, built in 1909–1911 to a design by Nikolay Orlov.
        The church of the former village of Blagusha in the middle of residential blocks
        📖 More about the placeCollapse
        Church of St Demetrius of Thessalonica in Blagusha
        © Inga Tomane · CC0
        • The main money for the church — about 100,000 rubles — was bequeathed by the honorary citizen Dimitry Ermakov in honor of his patron saint.
        • The church held up to 3,000 worshippers, and its construction cost almost 164,000 rubles.
        • The church was consecrated on 29 June 1911 by Metropolitan Vladimir of Moscow.
        • In 1931 the parish was closed and the building was given to the NKVD for a precious metals processing plant: smelting furnaces were installed in the altar.
        • The Soviet reconstruction deprived the church of its domes and the upper tiers of the bell tower — it was considered one of the most destroyed in Moscow.
        • Crosses were returned to the church on 17 November 1991, and services at the main altar resumed in the fall of 2001.
      10. 🚶 on foot
      11. 6
        🏛 Main Computing Center of the USSR Central Statistical Office
        Измайловское ш., 44
        The computing center of the USSR statistical office — a landmark of Soviet modernism.
        A modernist computing centre — view it from Izmailovskoye Shosse
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        Main Computing Center of the USSR Central Statistical Office
        © trolleway · CC BY 2.0
        • The building's chief architect was Leonid Pavlov, one of the main masters of Soviet modernism; it was built in 1968–1980.
        • The 22-story tower is a 30 m square in plan, held up by a cross-shaped monolithic rigidity core.
        • Data storage and machine halls were at the top and offices at the bottom, so parts of the tower differ in their floor rhythm.
        • The building's effect is a slender vertical that seems to hang over a long low podium with a "bent-up" edge on the street side.
        • Today the tower houses Rosstat's Main Interregional Center.
      12. 🚶 on foot
      13. 7
        🌳 Round Pond in Izmailovsky Park
        Измайловский парк, площадь Круглого пруда
        🚪 entrance from 1st Izmaylovskogo Zverintsa Street
        An almost perfectly round pond from which the alleys of the old forest park radiate like rays.
        The finish at a pond in the southern part of Izmailovo Park; it's 20 minutes to Shosse Entuziastov metro
        📖 More about the placeCollapse
        Round Pond in Izmailovsky Park
        © Lukdmi · CC BY-SA 4.0
        Round Pond in Izmailovsky Park
        © MBH · CC BY 4.0
        • The pond was dug in the 17th century as a decoration for the palace estate of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich.
        • At first it was called Sofronovsky — after the neighboring village of gardeners who served the tsar's estate.
        • The pond itself and the man-made island in its center are actually horseshoe-shaped; because of the many nightingales, the island was called Nightingale Island.
        • After the court moved to Petersburg, the pond became marshy: on maps of the first half of the 19th century it is marked as Blueberry Bog.
        • Two concentric alleys survive around the pond — of the Big and Small Circles — and the name comes from them.
        • In the 1950s the People's Friendship alley by the pond turned in winter into a popular Moscow skating rink.
        • The pond measures 270 by 220 m; its two-year reconstruction was completed in 2009.

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