|
 |
 |
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
"This square is like the huge open palm of time," wrote the poet Robert Rozhdestvensky. "Here eternity contemplates everyone, through the eyes of the Kremlin cathedrals, the eyes of the Kremlin stars."
History is everywhere here, in the ancient stones, the plastic forms, the colours and beautiful silhouettes of the buildings and monuments.
Red Square. Circa 1900
|
The square is mentioned for the first time in a fifteenth-century chronicle as the Torg, which shows that it was used for trading. Since then both its name and its shape have changed many times. In the sixteenth century it was called Trinity Square (after the stone church standing in it), and following the devastating conflagration of 1571 it was referred to as the Fire.
It acquired its present name in the seventeenth century. The word krasnaya meant "beautiful, fine, the best" in old Russia, as well as "red". Our age, while preserving the former significance of the square's name, has given it a new, symbolical meaning by linking it with the red banner of the Revolution, the state Hag of the USSR.
Red Square is indissolubly linked with the city's heart, the Kremlin. It owes its birth to the need to defend Moscow. After the erection of the Kremlin new walls and towers at the end of the fifteenth century, Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow issued a decree forbidding any building on the area to the east of the Kremlin, which was not protected by water on this side. The houses, booths and other buildings were removed from this spot, thus creating a large square by the Kremlin walls, in which only trade by peddling was allowed.
The first documentary evidence of what Red Square, then still called the Fi.re, looked like in this early period belongs to the sixteenth century. Thus, the first, very conventional, plan, a sketch of the Kremlin and its surroundings, was published by Baron Sigmund von Herberstein in 1549 in Vienna. After visiting Moscow twice as an envoy, he left some fascinating descriptions of the town. On Herberstein's sketch Red Square is shown as a hilly area crossed by roads leading to the St. Nicholas, St. Florus (Saviour) and SS Constantine and Helen carriage-way towers. The whole of its north-east section is taken up by eight rows of identical buildings, evidently with trading booths.
In 1597 the so-called Peter Sketch, or Godunov plan, based on the first Russian plan of Moscow, was published abroad. The Peter Sketch was discovered in the chancery of Peter the Great (hence its name) and published in Russian in 1838. This plan is more reliable than Herberstein's sketch. It shows clearly the moat along the Kremlin walls with bridges over it. The square is much bigger than nowadays. Part of it is already covered with rows of booths running down to the River Moskva.
Beyond the Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed you can see the small Church of St. Nicholas near the Moskva River, and beyond the latter four rows of booths and two tiny churches.
|
|
