STRANGE and unaccountable to the men of the Elizabethan age were the manners and customs of the Muscovites; at this day, some of the things these early visitors minutely described seem scarcely credible.
In many ways the life of the old boyards was not unlike that of their Tsar. They fought and worshipped and maintained state; bought, sold and sought wealth even as he did. There remain at least two old houses of boyards in Moscow. One, the Potieshni Dvorets in the Kremlin, formerly the dwelling of the Miloslavskis, is at the present time chiefly useful as indicating the architecture of a Russian house in mediæval times; and that only so far as the exterior is concerned, for the internal arrangements have been so many times altered as to bear now but little resemblance to a typical dwelling of the seventeenth century. The other house, the Palata Romanovykh, or Dom Romanof, was at one time the dwelling of the Romanof family and has been restored to as nearly as possible resemble the state in which it was when the Tsar Michael was elected to the throne in 1613. It is situated in the Varvarka, contiguous to the spot on which the English factory stood, and in addition to being a museum of minor antiquities serves well to illustrate some of the habits of the nobles of Moscow in the sixteenth century, for the house belonged to Nikita Romanof, grandfather of the Tsar Michael, who himself gave the house in which his own father was born to the adjoining monastery. Incorporated with those buildings, it shared their vicissitudes; was injured by fire repeatedly, altered, added to, then spoiled and sacked by the French.
It is not a large house: the frontage to the Varvarka is scarcely sixty feet and built on sloping ground it presents but one storey to this street. The principal entrance was from its own courtyard, where the south front presents four storeys looking over the Moskva (v. page 108).
The ground floor is of undoubted antiquity; brick built, plastered and painted. On this foundation is reared the wooden house in the true Russian style. The low clock tower over the entrance has for a weather vane, a griffin, the arms of the Romanofs; the windows are small, ogival, and glazed with mica panes.
It is impossible that in so small a house there could have been any accommodation for the multitude of retainers and body servants a boyard had always about his house. These lived in separate dwellings around the courtyard. The ground floor of Russian houses consisted of cellars and storerooms. In these vaults were kept: wine, mead, kvas, ice, frozen and salted meats and fish. The next storey in this house consists of kitchens and domestic offices—in a house not built upon sloping ground, these would be on the ground floor. The first floor, the Bel étage, which, in all old Russian buildings—houses, churches and shops—is reached by steps very similar to those from the courtyard to the Varvarka street level in the Dom Romanof.
Entering the vestibule from the Varvarka, on the right are two small rooms, one for the use of attendants the other now fitted as a nursery, but undoubtedly originally an ante-chamber. The largest room on this floor is called Krestovaia, or Chamber of the Cross. It was the state-room. Here the boyard received the priests who came at Easter-tide, Christmas, and other feasts and on special occasions to offer congratulations or perform sacred offices. The roof is vaulted, and, in addition to the niches seen in the walls, there are secret recesses for the concealment of treasure. In the “sacred corner” is an ancient ikon, and on the table before it, covered with a rich Persian cloth, are two crosses. The stand, or mountain, was the rack on which, upon all solemn or festive occasions, the family plate was displayed. Among the old treasures preserved here are a cocoa-nut shell mounted as a drinking-cup, and various other curious drinking-cups, bowls, and vases; an equestrian statuette, silver-gilt, of Charles I., a gift from that monarch to the Tsar Michael; two ewers presented by Charles II.; a silver salt cellar, and a puisoir presented by Martha Ivanovna, wife of the Patriarch, to her son the Tsar in 1618. No doubt it was in this room that the great banquets given by the boyard took place, but ordinarily the boyard would eat in his own apartment, his wife in hers. From this room a doorway leads to the private room of the boyard. This “study” is heated by a stove of coloured tiles, variously ornamented and bearing quaint inscriptions and designs, as a tortoise, “There is no better house than one’s own”; doves, “Fidelity unites us.” The cases contain some of the personal attire and weapons of the early boyards and their descendants, as: a silk mantle, some swords and daggers, a staff, the sceptre of the Tsar Michael, riding-boots, walking-sticks, and the like. The high narrow-heeled riding-boots are very curious, so too, on the copper inkstands, as antique in appearance as those of Chaucer’s day, will be seen the lion and unicorn, a Byzantine device often found in Russia. There is also a low seat used for writing, for the Russian placed the paper upon his knees, not on a table; his lines were not straight, and much good paper was wasted.