Exhibition "Moscow on foot. From the history of Kitay Gorod"

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, Kitay-Gorod became the main urban business district, Moscow City. What he lived and how this region was changing can be seen at the exhibition “Moscow on foot. From the history of Kitai Gorod ”at the Gilyarovsky Center, a branch of the Museum of Moscow, from June 30 to August 15.

“The exhibition will be a continuation of the cycle of exhibitions-guides on pedestrian zones of Moscow conceived by the Museum of Moscow. The first exhibition was held at the Museum of Moscow in September-October 2016 and invited visitors for a walk along the popular route: Bolshaya Dmitrovka - Kamergersky Lane - Stoleshniki - Kuznetsky Most, ”says Alina Saprykina, director of the Moscow Museum.

Each historical district of our city has a special flavor, character and purpose. Kitay Gorod is the center of business activity in Moscow, where people of different backgrounds, professions, wealth and aspirations worked and created a special geocultural space with their worldview and realities.

The exhibition was built as an unhurried walk along the streets of the district - Ilyinka, Nikolskaya, Varvarka, nearby squares and Okhotny Ryad with stops at famous and forgotten historical sites. Kitay-Gorod was the center of everything: the City Duma and Lubyanka Square with the exchange of hired carriages, the Upper Trading Rows and the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, ancient monasteries, churches, printing houses, educational institutions were adjacent to banks, well-known firms, fashion shops, hotels, lively taverns, markets and ubiquitous peddlers. As a guide to the city of China at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries. will be publicist Vladimir Gilyarovsky and writer Peter Boborykin - their texts will become part of the exhibition.

A cross-cutting theme on the exposition is the history of the Kitay-Gorod wall, an outstanding monument of Russian architecture almost lost today.

Creating a multidimensional image of Kitay Gorod, the exhibition combines different collections of the Moscow Museum. Archaeological objects will help to tell about historical monuments, a collection of arts and crafts - about the morals of the merchant environment, documents, office books, advertising, objects of the numismatics department - about trade and banks, books - about printing. Kitay-Gorod, its panoramas, buildings and residents also appear in historical photographs and phototypes, postcards, drawings and caricatures.

During the exhibition, the City Tour Bureau of the Museum of Moscow organizes a series of excursions and a quest for independent passage along the exhibition routes. The Gilyarovsky Center will host lectures and discussions on the past and future of Kitai Gorod.

Curators: Anastasia Grushetskaya, head of the City Tour Bureau of the Museum of Moscow, Vladimir Emelyanov, senior researcher at the Museum of Moscow.