The Cossacks were the means of enriching the church by recovering the silver looted by the French. The decorations are for the most part quite modern, and the paintings by an Italian. The cemetery has fine monuments, and there the people resort on summer evenings for the shade of the trees and restfulness of this peaceful retreat. Further along the Kalujskaya is the Alexandrina Palace, formerly the property of the Orloffs, with its celebrated pleasaunce “sans souçi,” extending to the wooded bank of the Moskva, with pretty views of Moscow and one excellent one of the Church of the Saviour seen alone at the extremity of a fine avenue of great trees.
Danilovski Monastyr
This has the advantage of being the oldest establishment of its kind in Moscow. Founded in the Kremlin by Daniel in 1272, it was transferred in 1330, and in the reign of Ivan IV. rebuilt on its present site. The walls are less ornate than those of the other fortifications of their time; the machecoules with superposed loop-holes over the gun-ports are also unusual and the polygonal corner towers have greater symmetry than those of Simonov or Novo Spasski. The chief object of interest within the building is the silver shrine of the founder placed in the church by the Tsar Alexis in 1652. The other two churches are commonplace, but in the cemetery is the tomb of Gogol, one of the most original of Muscovite authors.
The Zamoskvoretski quarter, south of the river, was in mediæval times little better than a swamp and long uninhabited. The Mongols settled there later, and Tartar names indicate some streets, as Balchoog, “quagmire,” and Bolotnaia, “swamps;” as late as the reign of the Great Catherine, the Island where is now the Babygorodskaia (little town) was open waste land, and there the rebel impostor Pugatchev, brought to Moscow in an iron cage, was beheaded in 1773. A raised road Krimski-val, above the fen-land leads from the Donskoi Monastyr to the Krimski Most, the tubular bridge over the river near the Ostogenka. It obtained its name from the fact that the Krim Tartars in their attacks on Moscow always crossed the river at that point, and it is still better known as Krimski Brode or “ford.”
Novo Devichi Convent
West of the Krimski Most, where the river makes a wide sweep and on three side bounds a large tract of low lying land, is the Maidens’ Field, which tradition asserts is the locality of the market at which the Tartars in old times purchased Muscovite girls for the Mohammedan harems in Constantinople and Ispahan. Historians contend that the name is derived from the convent established there since 1525. There is no doubt that this was established in the early years of the sixteenth century to commemorate the recapture of Smolensk by Vasili III. It is also indisputable that there were already convents existing within Moscow and that Novo Devichi Monastyr means simply New Monastery for Women. Helen, “the maid,” was the first abbess of this, and may have given it the name, but it was customary in Moscow, before and since, to name the convents after the dedication, as Conception, Nativity, Passion, etc., so some earlier use of the popular appellation “Maidens’ Field” is more probable.
The convent is two miles distant from the Kremlin, but also on the river bank, though a tank serving as a moat actually separates it from the present raised embankment of the Moskva. The walls were built by the same Italians who completed the walls of the Kremlin, and are of the same type, but round and square towers alternate and both have some of the heavy florid decoration so common in Moscow. The single and double dropped-arch is most conspicuous, and the quaintness of the architecture is accentuated by the glaring disparity of the colouring—dead white for the walls and interior of the open turrets, dark Indian red for the tops of the towers and masonry above the corbels of the machecoules. The belfry is of five lofty stages en retraite surmounted with a gilded bulbous dome and immense cross; its colours are pink and white with neutral facings: yellow, green, rose-pink picked out with white or darker tints are used for the other churches; that over the gateway being white with green roof, and both green and blue are used lavishly elsewhere for the roofs of the buildings within the enclosure, which together with the gold on domes and crosses, gives to the convent-fortress a beauty that is wholly eastern.
The two churches Vasili founded have been preserved and others added. They are—
Church of the Assumption, with a chapel dedicated to the Holy Ghost.
Church of St Ambrose, of Milan.