Set amid 4 sq km of parkland, on a bluff above a bend in the Moscow River, this Museum-Reserve is an ancient royal country seat and Unesco World Heritage site. Many festivals are held here, so check if anything is happening during your visit.
From Bolshaya ul, enter at the rear of the grounds through the 17th-century Saviour Gate to the white-washed Our Lady of Kazan Church , both built in the time of Tsar Alexey. The church faces the site of his great wooden palace, which was demolished in 1768 by Catherine the Great. Ahead, the white, tent-roofed 17th-century front gate and clock tower mark the edge of the old inner-palace precinct. The golden double-headed eagle that tops the gate is the symbol of the Romanov dynasty. The adjacent buildings house an interesting museum with a bit of everything: a model of Alexey’s wooden palace, material on rebellions associated with Kolomenskoe, and Russian handcrafts from clocks and tiles to woodcarving and metalwork.
Outside the front gate, overlooking the river, rises Kolomenskoe’s loveliest structure, the quintessentially Russian Ascension Church . Built between 1530 and 1532 for Grand Prince Vasily III, it probably celebrated the birth of his heir, Ivan the Terrible. It is actually an important development in Russian architecture, reproducing the shapes of wooden churches in brick for the first time, and paving the way for St Basil’s Cathedral 25 years later. Immediately west of it are the round 16th-century St George’s Bell Tower and another 17th-century tower. About 300m further southwest, across a gully, the white St John the Baptist Church was built for Ivan the Terrible in the 1540s or 1550s. It has four corner chapels that make it a stylistic ‘quarter-way house’ between the Ascension Church and St Basil’s. Among the old wooden buildings on the grounds is Peter the Great’s cabin, where he lived while supervising ship- and fort-building at Arkhangelsk.
