Pashkov House and the Znamenka estates

⏱ 50 min🚶 1.4 km🍽 1📍 4 stops

🐢 A little — under 3 km

Bazhenov's snow-white palace on the hill opposite the Kremlin, quiet Znamenka with its mansions and the architecture museum in an estate courtyard. Lunch at Arbatskaya at the end.

🏛 History and architecture🎨 Art⏱ An hour or so

🗺 Open in Yandex Maps

1
🏛 Pashkov House
🎟 ticket · inside by guided tour only
A snow-white Neoclassical manor of 1784–1786 with a belvedere; today the building belongs to the Russian State Library.
Bazhenov's palace on the hill opposite the Kremlin
📖 More about the placeCollapse
© Юрий Д.К. · CC BY 4.0
© Perituss · CC0
- The client was Captain-Lieutenant Pyotr Pashkov, son of Peter I's orderly; Bazhenov is considered the author of the house, but there are no documents.
- It was the first secular building in Moscow from whose windows people looked at the Kremlin not from below.
- On Paul I's orders the statue of Minerva, a symbol of the victories of his mother's reign, was removed from the dome.
- After the fire of 1812 the belvedere was rebuilt in 1815–1818, presumably by Osip Bove.
- From 1861 the Rumyantsev Museum and its library, the future "Leninka", were housed here.
- Repairs to the building took almost twenty years, from 1988 to 2007.
- In Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita", Woland, Azazello and Levi Matthew meet on the roof of Pashkov House.
🚶 on foot
2
🚶 Znamenka Street
A quiet old street from Borovitskaya Square to the Arbat Gate: mansions of the 18th–19th centuries and Defense Ministry buildings.
A street of manor houses
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© Perituss · CC0
- The name appeared in the late 16th century after the Church of the Sign of the Mother of God, demolished in 1931.
- From 1925 to 1990 the street bore the name of Frunze, who worked here in the Revolutionary Military Council building; his monument stands in the small park by no. 12.
- Znamenka is only 670 meters long.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky lived at no. 9/12, building 2, in 1872–1873 and 1877.
- The old General Staff building (no. 19) is based on Apraksin's palace of 1792 by Francesco Camporesi.
- The facades of the Shamshin apartment building (no. 8/13, 1909) were drawn by Fyodor Shekhtel.
🚶 on foot
3
🖼 Shchusev Museum of Architecture
ул. Воздвиженка, 5/25
🎟 ticket
An 18th-century Neoclassical Talyzin estate that holds drawings, models and fragments of Moscow's lost buildings.
The architecture museum and the “Ruin” wing; we look from outside; inside is separate, another hour
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© Kemal KOZBAEV · CC BY-SA 4.0
- The museum was founded in 1945 with Alexey Shchusev as its first director; it has borne his name since 1949.
- The museum is considered the largest architecture museum in the world: its collection holds more than a million drawings, models and photographs.
- Until the early 1990s the exhibition of Old Russian architecture was in the Donskoy Monastery.
- In the mid-1960s the mansion became deformed when the Filyovskaya metro line was driven under Vozdvizhenka.
- The museum archive holds the personal archives of Pyotr Baranovsky, Alexey Shchusev and Ivan Zholtovsky.
- A branch of the museum is Konstantin Melnikov's round house, built in 1927–1929.
🚶 on foot
4
🍽 Grabli restaurant on the Arbat
ул. Арбат, 1
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Lunch at Arbatskaya
🍴 A self-service restaurant on the 2nd floor at the start of the Arbat: you pick hot dishes, salads and pastries yourself. What to order: cheesecake or another homemade dessert, pastries, pumpkin cream soup.