The idea of the exhibition was born from a publishing and research project: a few years ago, the Housing Finance Bank ordered an archival and historical study of this street, and then the publishing house "Lingua-F" published scientific research in the form of a two-volume book: the first volume is "A street called Spiridonovka …", the second - "Spiridonovka in faces". After the books were ready, an exhibition was held at the Museum of Architecture; it was early 2007. Now it is repeated in the Moscow Architectural Institute with changes and additions.
I must say that not every book is accompanied by a special exhibition in its tracks. But in this case, the emergence of the exhibition is more than justified. The fact is that these publications are not guides, not reprints of long-known facts, not albums, or even a collection of essays or nostalgic photographs. Their texts are full-fledged scientific research done at a modern level and on the basis of meticulous archival research. Their illustrations - in addition to old photographs and drawings, many of which are published for the first time, are paintings by the Moscow artist Vladislav Ryabov. Pictures make up about half of the visual range of books, and in themselves are a kind of research performed, figuratively speaking, in an artistic form.
These paintings are reconstructions of the area, made on the basis of the same archival and other research, i.e. claiming a high (at the modern level of knowledge) degree of reliability. They are made from different angles and depict not only architectural monuments as they might look, but also topography - streams, hills and houses, and all this is not invented, as often happens, but is based on real material.
The exhibition seeks to reflect all the historical layers that have occurred in the appearance of the street. It all starts with a general panorama of Moscow in the middle of the 17th century, drawn by Vladislav Ryabov, which, in addition to temples, clearly depicts the relief of the area - the very ponds and hills. The relief is interesting in that now in Moscow it has survived only very, very partially. There are almost no ponds and rivers, there are almost no hillocks, but the builders of underground parking lots and other landscape undertakings are fiercely fighting with them.
Along the entire length of the walls, there are sweeps of streets, both Spiridonovka and adjacent to it - Malaya Nikitskaya and Sadovo-Kudrinskaya, made by the researcher-archivist Olga Kim. Thanks to the panoramas, the fullness of the feeling of the street is created, and besides, its most concentrated period - the turn of the XIX-XX centuries - when the main buildings were already built, and it had not yet come to demolition. Brief histories of the most valuable objects and photographs from the end of the last century are presented below the panoramas. Next to them are modern photographs of those places, which make it possible to personally compare the current and former Spiridonovka.
However, the matter does not end with two-dimensional images, some objects can even be walked around. In the center of the hall, the students of the Moscow Architectural Institute placed models of the most valuable and interesting buildings of the street made with their own hands. Here you can see the house, Tarasov's mansion, architect I. V. Zholtovsky, the oldest building of the street is the Granatny Dvor of the 17th century, the Ryabushinsky mansion and the Church of Spiridonia, the main temple of the street, an exceptional architectural monument of the time of Patriarch Filaret and Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich.
The history of Spiridonovka goes back centuries. Initially, it was a road that appeared in a rather swampy area and repeats the bend of the Chortoryya stream. It led from the Nikitsky Gate of the White House to Kozikhinskaya or Kozya Sloboda, where the metropolitan country estate with its own farm was located. Later here, in 1633, on a high ledge, the stone church of St. Spyridonius was built, which later gave the name to the street and gave birth to a large patriarchal settlement around itself with houses of priests and deacons. Sloboda became a source of development for the region.
In the 18th century, noble and merchant estates began to be built here, the most famous of which is the estate of E. A. Baratynsky and I. I. Dmitrieva. Closer to the turn of the century, mansions and apartment buildings of the Art Nouveau era appeared, among them two buildings of F. O. Shekhtel - the famous Ryabushinsky mansion, from which Spiridonovka Street now begins, and the neo-Gothic house of Savva Morozov, which has preserved beautiful interiors.
Undoubtedly, the most destructive invasion of the 20th century on the city's fabric of this street was the demolition in 1930 of the Church of St. Spyridonius, an amazing monument of Moscow architecture of the time of Patriarch Filaret and Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich. The church stood at the corner of the street and Spiridonyevsky lane, was crowned with the traditional "kokoshnik hill" on a strangely shaped quadrangle - short but wide. Such churches spread in the middle of the 17th century, and the temple of Spyridonius was almost the first of them.
If we take the demolition of this wonderful church as a parenthesis, then we must admit that some fragments of Spiridonovka have survived just fine. We mentally remove a couple of looming foreign cars out of sight - and you can enjoy the image of old Moscow, if not two hundred years old, then at least one hundred years ago. Or make movies; which, in fact, has already been done, and more than once.
