Location: Prospekt Andropova 39 Map
Tel. (499) 6155 2768
Subway: Kolomenskaya
Front gate Museum & Churches
Open: 10am- 5pm Tue- Sun
Grounds: Open: 10am- 8pm daily
Cuman Chief Burial
(11- 12 century)
The location of Kolomenskoye was inhabited long before Slavs moved here. In the 9th- 8th century BC the location was inhabited by Dyakovskaya culture, a Finno- Ugric group of people whose names are still preserved in the region Taldom, Yauza and possibly Moscow Rivers. According to local legends pagan temple was also located in the vicinity of the today's church. However the Dyakovskaya culture along with its cities was mysteriously abandoned. The reason for their demise is still unknown. Several tribes seemed to assimilate well with the coming Slavic tribes.
According to historian Mikhail Tikhomirov, the name of the village
came from the Finno-Ugric term "kolomishche", denoting a place of mass
burial. According to another version, Kolomna was founded by residents
of Kolomna fleeing from the invasion of the Mongol-Tatars, taking the
name of their city as a basis. The first mention of Kolomenskoye is
contained in the spiritual letter of Ivan Kalita dated 1339, the
document is the oldest known grand ducal spiritual letters. In the
1370s-1380s, the estate belonged to his grandson Prince Vladimir
Serpukhov. It is known that returning from the victory at Kulikovo
field, Dmitry Donskoy drove through Kolomenskoye, where Serpukhov
organized a solemn meeting for him.
In 1532, Prince Vasily III,
in honor of the birth of his son Ivan, laid the Church of the Ascension
of the Lord in Kolomenskoye, built according to the project of the
Italian architect Petrok Maly. In this temple, Ivan IV performed a
two-week pilgrimage in 1564, after which he announced the beginning of
the Oprichnina.
Researchers suggest that by the end of the XVI
century residential buildings appeared in Kolomenskoye: this is
evidenced by the mention of a "three-day feast" held in honor of Vasily
III on the day of the consecration of the Church of the Ascension, as
well as information about the now lost pleasure palace of Ivan the
Terrible. During the Oprichnina war, one of the vigilantes Heinrich von
Staden mentioned that a detachment of 1,500 people would be needed to
capture the palace.
Kolomna area, due to its proximity to the
city center in the XV-XVII centuries, was regularly used by troops
attacking Moscow as a temporary camp. So, in 1407, the camp of Khan
Edigey was set up in the settlement, and in 1605, the army of False
Dmitry I was located in the village. In 1606, Ivan Bolotnikov's troops
also stopped in Kolomenskoye during the peasant war.
At the beginning of the XVII century, the construction of the
Sovereign's Court began in Kolomenskoye, which included a wooden palace,
a stone winter house church of Our Lady of Kazan, as well as a complex
of outbuildings. At the entrance to the estate there were multi-tiered
Front gates with adjoining chambers. At this time, Kolomenskoye acquired
the features of a manor estate and became the favorite summer residence
of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Carpenters, grooms, bridge builders,
watchmakers, as well as gardeners serving the palace economy lived in
the village and the villages assigned to it.
In 1662 Kolomenskoye
became the center of the Copper Rebellion. The rebels went to the court
of Alexei Mikhailovich with demands to hand over the boyars to them for
punishment. Ten thousand troops suppressed the riot at the cost of a
thousand lives.
In 1666, Alexey Romanov built a new wooden palace
in Kolomenskoye, consisting of more than 270 rooms. Over the next
century, churches, guardhouses and chambers were built around the new
palace, and the royal estate was fenced off.
Peter I spent his
childhood in Kolomenskoye, who first visited the residence at the age of
three in 1675. The royal family often came to the estate, but rarely
stayed for long, preferring to spend time in Vorobyov and
Preobrazhenskoye. In Kolomenskoye, the future emperor staged battles of
funny troops, which later formed the basis of the regular army. Starting
in 1690, Peter the Great traveled to Kolomenskoye on a yacht along the
Moscow River. After each of his Azov campaigns, troops were gathered in
Kolomenskoye for the solemn entry into Moscow.
In the XVII
century Kolomenskoye became the economic and administrative center of
the Kolomna palace parish. It consisted of four villages and ten
villages with a population of more than 700 men. A large role in the
economy of the parish at that time was played by garden and park
ensembles, on the territory of which three gardens operated —
Voznesensky, Kazansky and Dyakovsky. The estate was engaged in seedlings
of oaks, elms, cherry trees, linden trees, firs and cedars. Apples from
the Ascension Garden were delivered to the royal table.
Despite the transfer of the capital to St. Petersburg at the
beginning of the XVIII century, the sovereigns continued to stay in
Kolomenskoye during trips to Moscow, and their courtyard was regularly
completed. So, in 1767, by decree of Catherine II, the wooden palace of
Alexei Mikhailovich was demolished. Instead, a new four-storey palace,
designed by Prince P. V. Makulov, was built in 1766-1767 opposite the
northern facade of the Church of the Ascension. The building was built
using materials from the former Alexei Mikhailovich Palace, the lower
floors of the new building were stone, and the upper floors were wooden.
In 1768, the ensemble of the Front Gate was rebuilt, a second floor was
built over the chambers of the Sytny Dvor, Colonel's and Clerical
Chambers, adapted for kitchens and utility rooms of the new palace.
The Catherine Palace, in turn, was rebuilt in 1825 by architect
Yevgraf Tyurin. As a result of the work carried out, the building was
completely dismantled and moved to the bank of the Moskva River. In the
same year, two lime alleys were planted on the territory of the estate,
connecting the Spassky and the Front Gates.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Kolomenskoye had become the
religious center of the district — there were more than four active
canonical churches on the territory of the manor estate. At the same
time, Kolomenskoye, with the adjacent villages of Novosti and Nagatino,
was considered one of the centers of Old Believers near Moscow, and
numerous prayer houses of Old Believers were located here. However,
after the 1917 revolution, most churches and all prayer houses were
closed. And in the later Soviet years, the ancient burials of Old
Believers were also ruined.
In 1924, restorer and architect Peter
Baranovsky took the initiative to create an open-air museum of wooden
architecture in Kolomenskoye. At the initiative of Baranovsky, the
churches of the Ascension, the Beheading of John the Baptist, St.
George's Bell Tower, as well as the Front and Spassky Gates were
recreated. In addition to preserving the manor buildings, under the
leadership of Baranovsky, the tower from the Nikolo-Korel monastery and
the Moss Tower of the Sumy prison were transported to Kolomenskoye. At
the same time, museum workers began collecting works of Russian art:
paintings, woodwork, metal, old printed and handwritten books, as well
as tiles and other objects of applied art.
During the
construction of the Moscow Canal in 1932-1938, Dmitrovlag camps began to
function in Nagatin, one of them was located in Kolomenskoye, on the
site of the current pier, where the clergy were kept. Initially, in
1932, it was to this place that barges with prisoners arrived for the
construction of Lock 10. In memory of them, a Cross of Worship was
erected at the Eastern Entrance to the park, where mass graves are
located, and then demolished.
Since 1933, Ivan Fedorovich
Barshchevsky, a famous photographer of antiquity, worked as a curator of
the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve. In 1933, Baranovsky was arrested for
helping to organize a museum in the Trinity Boldinsky Monastery. He was
released after 3 years. In 1938, the restorer appealed to the Presidium
of the Academy of Architecture of the USSR with a "Program for
organizing a museum town of folk architecture." However, N. K.
Krupskaya, who at that time was replacing the post of Deputy People's
Commissar of Education of the RSFSR, spoke out against Baranovsky. In
her review of the museum's expansion project, Krupskaya called it a
"monstrous event", noting that the "all-Union selection" and "removal of
characteristic wooden buildings" from different places is associated
with their preliminary destruction and separation from the natural
environment.
The Moscow government returned to the Baranovsky
program again in the 1960s, when there was interest in the mass
settlement of unpromising villages in the Non-Chernozem region. To
preserve the monuments of wooden architecture, the government decided to
develop a network of open-air museums, but the concept again raised
objections among cultural figures.
It is a very controversial
idea to save monuments by taking them to open–air museums, a cruel idea
<...> When creating these museums, the Northern Russian landscape, its
historicism, its poetry, in short, its life are irreparably destroyed.
And all these temples, mills, huts, removed from their midst, crowded
senselessly, lose the finiteness of their existence. It is as if the
soul dies in them, as it dies in the landscape from where they were
abducted.
Artist Nikolai Plastov
As a result, in the 1970s,
Baranovsky, together with other members of the Architectural Section of
the Central Council of the All-Russian Society of Historical and
Cultural Monuments, P. P. Revyakin and L. M. Lisenko, created a
comprehensive system for the development of protection of cultural
heritage and nature.
During the active development of Nagatin in
the 1960s and 1970s, Kolomenskoye was also expected to change — two
highways were to pass through the territory of the museum and its
embankment. Thanks to the efforts of P. D. Baranovsky and other
defenders of Kolomenskoye, the projects were curtailed, but the
embankment managed to be rolled into concrete, which led to two serious
landslides under the Church of the Ascension due to stopping the outlet
of springs.
The basis of the exposition of the museum-reserve was
made up of architectural objects of the XVII—XVIII centuries brought at
different times: an outbuildings from the village of Preobrazhenskoye
near Moscow, the Passage gates of the Nikolo-Korel monastery, the
watchtower of the Bratsk prison built by the Yenisei Cossacks, as well
as the house of Peter I from near Arkhangelsk. The historian I. M.
Gostev, as a result of archival research, established that the 1702
lighthouses were not preserved, and in Kolomenskoye there is an
arbitrary reconstruction from the remains of the palace of 1709-1710,
built for Peter the Great, in which he had never been.
By the
1980 Olympic Games, the city authorities issued a decree on the complete
restoration of the Kolomenskoye architectural complex. Then one of the
most ancient cemeteries in Moscow, the Dyakov Cemetery, was destroyed.
The next large-scale restoration was initiated by the Ministry of
Culture of Moscow in 2003-2005. In 2010, the Alexei Mikhailovich Palace
was restored, which included 26 teremkov, 270 rooms with more than 3,000
windows.
Since 2012, the largest honey fairs in Russia have been
held on the fairground in Kolomenskoye.
In 2023, the coastal
section of the Kuryanovskaya floodplain, part of the Kolomenskoye
ensemble, the protective buffer zone of the UNESCO site of the Temple of
the Ascension were destroyed and a landfill with an industrial zone was
built.
Church of the Ascension of the Lord 1528-1532 The Orthodox church
belongs to the Danilovsky deanery of the Moscow Diocese. The building
was erected by Vasily III in honor of the birth of his son Ivan IV. The
Church of the Ascension of the Lord is considered to be the first stone
tent temple on the territory of modern Russia.
The Temple of the
Beheading of John the Baptist in Dyakov in the 1550s is one of the few
surviving multi-pillar temples of the XVI century, consisting of five
octagonal pillars isolated from each other. It is believed that the
temple was built by Basil III as a "prayer", in which the tsar asked for
the gift of an heir.
Kazan Church 1649-1653 The construction of
the church was timed to coincide with the birth of heir to the throne
Dmitry Alekseevich, when the church-wide veneration of the Kazan Icon of
the Mother of God was established. Initially, the temple was built as a
house and was connected by a passage to the royal palace. Currently, it
houses the Sovereign Icon of the Mother of God.
The Church of St.
George the Victorious with a bell tower and refectory 1600-1648 The bell
tower of the modern church was built at the beginning of the XVI century
and belonged to the nearby Church of the Ascension. Researchers suggest
that at the end of the XVII century the bell tower was rebuilt into a
church. In 1840-1842, the wooden part was dismantled, and the modern
church of St. George the Victorious was erected on the site of the old
refectory.
Vodovzvodnaya tower 1670s Vodovzvodnaya tower was
built in the second half of the XVII century. In 1675, the Master Bogdan
Puchin installed a water-pumping mechanism in the tower, which supplied
water to the Sovereign's yard. The second purpose of the tower is the
travel gate to the Voznesensky Garden and the village of Dyakovskoye.
The front gate 1671-1673 Originally served as the main entrance to
the royal estate. They consist of four tiers and end with a tower with
the coat of arms of the Russian Empire restored in 1994. The belfry of
the tower houses the bells of the hour battle, and above the arches
there is an Organ Chamber. Currently, the monument houses museum
exhibitions.
Colonel's Chambers XVII century During the reign of
Alexei Mikhailovich, the building housed the headquarters of the
regiment guarding the palace.
In 1672, the wards were built on
the site of a wooden Command hut, they housed the offices of the estate
manager and his assistants.
The 17th century Sytny Dvor Building
is one of the main surviving buildings of the estate's economic complex.
The first mention dates back to the 1680s.
The back gate of the
XVII century Originally served as the entrance to the economic courtyard
of the residence, and in the XVIII century it became the main entrance
to the estate. In the 19th century, the monograms of Peter the Great
were mounted on the top of the gate. In 1814, the gate was dismantled,
and in 1868 it was restored. In 2001-2003, they were restored.
Guardhouses XVII century The guardhouses at the Spassky and Front Gates
were restored in 2007.
The wall of the Fodder yard of the XVII
century The wall was erected simultaneously with the Spassky Gate, in
2000-2003 the Committee on Cultural Heritage of Moscow investigated the
remains of fortifications.
The wall of the Bread yard of the XVII
century is an outbuilding used for making bread.
The fence of the
Sovereign's yard XVII century The Wall adjoins the Spassky Gate and
represents the preserved fragments of the Fence of the Sovereign's yard.
The clock pillar (Petition pillar) 1667-1670 The pillar is located
on the site of the Kolomna Palace of Alexei Mikhailovich. According to
one version, the pillar was used to hang out royal orders and petitions
of citizens. According to another, as the basis of a sundial. During the
Patriotic War of 1812, the building was severely damaged.
The
tower of the Bratsky Ostrog 1659 Fortress was built in 1631 by the
Cossack Maxim Perfiliev on the Angara River, the ostrog was of great
importance as a guard route to the conquest of Transbaikalia. With the
loss of military significance, the guard post was rebuilt in the village
of Bratsko-Ostrozhnoye. One of the towers was dismantled and transported
to Kolomenskoye.
The tower of the Sumy ostrog (Mokhovaya) XVII
century is the only surviving wooden defensive structure left from the
fortress built on the Suma River at the expense of the Solovetsky
Monastery. Disassembled, it was delivered to Kolomenskoye back in the
1930s, but it was assembled only in the early 2000s.
The tower of
the Nikolo-Korelsky Monastery in 1698 became the only structure
preserved from the Nikolo-Korelsky Monastery, built at the mouth of the
Northern Dvina River in the XIV—XV century. As a result of a fire in
1798, most of the buildings of the monastery were destroyed.
The
House of Peter I 1702 is a wooden house built for Peter I in front of
the Novodvinsk Fortress on Markov Island during his visit to
Arkhangelsk. The emperor lived there for two and a half months,
overseeing the construction of the fortress. In 1710, the house was
damaged by ice floes brought by water, after which it was moved to the
forstadt of the Novodvinsk fortress, in 1877 the house was moved from
the fortress to Arkhangelsk, and in 1934 to Kolomenskoye. Subsequently,
researchers determined that the museum exhibit is an arbitrary
reconstruction from materials from the dismantling of a two-story palace
in 1709-1710, which Peter I had never been to.
Household building
(Honey factory) XVIII century. Initially, the building was located on
the territory of the Nikolaevsky Co-Religionist monastery, honey-based
dishes were prepared in the premises. In 1923, the monastery was
abolished, and in 1927, the building of the honey factory was moved to
the territory of Kolomenskoye.
The 1825 Palace Pavilion is the
only part of the lost palace of Emperor Alexander I that has been
preserved on the territory of the museum. The pavilion was built in the
Empire style, and the main facade is decorated with a Doric portico. In
2005-2006, the building was renovated.
Garden gate XIX century
The gate was built from bricks of dismantled buildings of the XVII
century and serves as the entrance to the Ascension Garden.
Memorial pillar-chapel of the XIX century is a memorial sign erected by
peasants in the village of Shaidorovo in honor of the abolition of
serfdom by the reform of Alexander II. In 1980, the sign was moved to
Kolomenskoye, and in 2005 it was restored.
The watermill on the
river Zhuzhe 2007 was built in 2007 on the model of wooden watermills of
the XIX century.
The wooden Church of St. George the Victorious
1685 is a two-tiered pine church built on the banks of the Erga River in
the XVII century, in 2008-2011 it was transported to Kolomenskoye.
The wooden Palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich 2008-2010 is the
reconstructed palace of Alexei Mikhailovich, recreated according to
preserved plans and measurements on the territory of the former village
of Dyakovskoye beyond the Voice Ravine. The structure is a life-size
exterior layout of the building, in which the interiors are also
partially recreated. The design and proportions of the building were
decided in accordance with the drawings made by decree of Catherine II.
The Dutch house of Peter I 2000s Exterior and interior layout of the
house of Peter I in Zaandam. It was presented to Russia by the
Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands as part of the 2013
cross-year of Russian-Dutch cooperation.
Among many architectural remains that are clearly visible in Kolomenskoye you will find Golosov Ovrag. Boulders that are spread all over the location are said to be remains of the pagan temple. Belief that they can give sexual powers or increase fertility are still alive today. If you will see a naked person don't be surprised. He or she probably knows what he/she is doing. Or at least they think they do.
The Creek has a long trail of mysterious events. According to the local legends people have been disappearing in the green fog and reappearing years later. The oldest recorded phenomenon happened in the 17th century AD then Russians caught several Tatars horsemen. They claimed they were soldiers of the Devlet Gerey who managed to capture and burn Moscow 50 years earlier. The weapons they had were obviously obsolete and no Tatar would ever dare to come anywhere close to Moscow at the time. Especially with such bizarre cover story.
Another interesting story dates back to 1812 then couple of peasants decided to take a shortcut through the creek. They emerged 21 years later. Both were as young as they were in 1812 that obviously surprised everyone. During police interrogation they claimed that while walking through the creek they saw a ray of light. Several hairy human like creatures stopped them and told them to go back. Police decided to check the truth fullness of their words and tried to walk through the creek alone at night. His friends on the other side waited for an hour. Despite their best attempts they did not find their friend. He disappeared.
Twentieth century did not end strange sightings. Several locals claimed they tall hairy humans emerge from a fog and then hide in the Golosov Ovrag again. Another story claims that in 1930's local policeman was attacked by a huge hairy creature that dwelled in the creek and decided to defend its territory. Regardless whether it is true or not staying in the park overnight to check the claims would not the be the best idea one can come up with.