The Arbat：Moscow's most charming and lively pedestrian street

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(Free-Press-Release.com) April 9, 2006 -- The Arbat is Moscow's most charming and lively pedestrian street. Once a bohemian quarter of the city, littered with cafes crammed full of the capital's intellectual elite, the Arbat still retains a vibrant and artistic air today, with souvenir stalls selling traditional Russian gifts, artists offering original canvases and street performers entertaining the shoppers.

The street boasts an impressive selection of cafes, restaurants and bars, where you can sample everything from a decent cup of coffee and a French pastry, to a genuine Lebanese shawerma (kebab) or a tasty thick milkshake in a genuine 1950s American Diner. The Arbat is a symbol of old Moscow and its name is mentioned in the city chronicles as far back as 1493. In that year the whole city was engulfed in a terrible fire, thought to have been sparked by a candle in the Church of St. Nicholas in Peski, which is situated on the Arbat.
The root of the name "Arbat" probably comes from the Salvonic word gorbat, meaning "hilly ground", although it is equally as possible that the word stems from the Arabic word arbad, meaning "suburb". The latter word may well have been used to describe the Arbat area, as in the 15th century only the Kremlin itself was regarded as the city proper, and the area was used to great caravans of goods arriving from the East, so an Arabic word could well have been assimilated into the local dialect.

From the second half of the 18th century onwards, the Arbat and the maze of back streets that surround it became Moscow's most aristocratic and literary neighborhood and home to the city's intelligentsia. House number 2 features the famous Prague Restaurant, opened in the 1870s by the merchant Tararykin and famed as one of the best dining establishments in Moscow until well after the turn of the century.

The restaurant was built and decorated in sumptuous Art Nouveau style by the architects Kekushev and Ericson, and adorned with mirrors, glittering bronze figures and gilt stucco moldings. It was here in 1901 that Chekhov toasted the first performance of his play The Three Sisters, and here in 1913 that the famous Russian painter Ilya Repin celebrated the restoration of his painting Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan, which had been slashed by an icon painter of the Old Believer sect whilst hanging in the Tretyakov Gallery. The Prague is also host to the annual Rubinshtein lunch, held in honor of the musician and founder of the Moscow Conservatoire.

Just off the Arbat along Serebriany (Silver) Lane, whose name derives from the silver coin mint whose craftsmen used to live here, there used to exist the estate of the newly married Suvurov couple, whose son became the mighty Alexander Suvorov, the great 18th century Russian military commander who fought victoriously in the Russo-Turkish war of 1787-1791 and the Napoleonic wars of 1812. Opposite Serebriany Lane stands Starokonushenny Lane, once home to the philosopher and Moscow University professor, Sergei Trubetskoi, in whose musical soirees the young composer Alexander Scriabin used to play his new compositions.

On the other side of the Arbat stands Kaloshin Lane, where the residence of a Madame Malinovskaya used to stand, the aristocratic lady who stood in as the mother of the bride in the poet Alexander Pushkin's marriage. The same house was later owned by the geologist, geographer and member of the Academy of Sciences, Obruchev, the principal designer of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The lane was also the site of a small 19th century house in which the great writer Count Fyodor Tolstoy once lived. Just around the corner stands the Wall of Viktor Tsoy, built and adorned with messages to honor the famous Russian rock legend who died tragically in a car accident in 1990.
At the junction of Krivoarbatsky Lane and the Arbat stands the oldest building in the area, a mansion dating form the 18th century. In the 1820s it came under the ownership of Count Bobrinsky, the grandson of Empress Catherine the Great and her lover Count Grigory Orlov, and who came under secret police scrutiny for failing to disclose information about the early 19th century Decembrist Secret Society.

Source: http://www.google.com/www.moscow-taxi.com