Moscow, May 2024

Moscow is a spacious city, with a lot of parks throughout the city. All major European cities have parks, but Moscow seems to have more green areas than most, and this is confirmed on the maps (Paris and Moscow have roughly similar populations):

Paris and Moscow city centres to the same scale

The city is centred on the Kremlin, a roughly triangular area mostly open to the public bounded by sides about 800m long, with walls dating from the 15th century. This photograph was taken from a pedestrian bridge across the Moskva river looking directly at the Kremlin, which is on the other side of the road bridge. The red towers are on its boundary, and the tall buildings with the golden domes are inside the Kremlin:

Moscow has a "business district" which looks like the business districts of other cities but it's about 6km west of the city centre. The view is from Victory Park:

Back to the Kremlin.

There are more than a dozen towers on the Kremlin walls. On the left, the main entrance tower, approaching from the outside. On the right, Nikolskaya Tower from the inside.

The cannons on the left of the right-hand picture are trophies captured from the invading French army in 1812. There are lots more of them below:

The Moscow Kremlin actually contains within its walls four cathedrals, three of them on Cathedral Square:

The Cathedral of the Assumption. The present building dates from the fifteenth century. The richly-decorated interior was looted by Polish-Lithuanian armies in 1612, and by Napoleon's soldiers in 1812, but restored in 1894 and from 1910 to 1918. It was a museum during the Soviet era but returned to the Russian Orthodox church in 1991.

Blagoveshchensky cathedral, built in the 15th century;
originally the personal chapel for the Tsars.

Ivan the Great Bell Tower, built in 1508.
The three cathedrals on the square don't have belfries.

Outside the north-west wall of the Kremlin is Red Square.
St Basil's cathedral is at its southern end:

To the north-east of the Kremlin is Manezhnaya Square,
which has ornamental pools, fountains, and statues depicting scenes from Russian folk-tales. This one refers to a frog which turns into a princess, rather like the Grimm's fairy-tale which has a frog turning into a prince.

The 15 lines of the Moscow Metro are a pleasant way to travel within Moscow. The stations are clean and spacious, and have individual, interesting decorations, many dating from the Soviet era. The pictures below are a sample of the stations we actually used; I can't remember all their names (if you are interested, upload the images to yandex.com and it will probably identify them).

Not far from the city centre is the 16th-century Novodevichy convent, seen from its charming park:

About 10 km south of the city centre is Tsaritsyno, a palace built by and for the Russian empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) in a large park. However, just when it was finished, in 1796, Catherine died. Her successors never used the palace, and over the following 200 years, it fell into ruin. It was restored in the 2000s using the original plans. The large park, with pools and fountains, which surrounds it is worth a visit in itself.