Tverskaya street begins from Manezhnaya square of Moscow.
Tversaya street’s history goes back to XIV, when it was a road connecting Moscow and Tver, which back then, was an important economical center of Russia.
Importance of Tvreskaya street increased when Tver’s principality was joined to Grand Duchy of Moscow. This road at that time became a high-way connecting Moscow with Pribaltic, Middle East and Middle Asia. The old Russian proverb saying “Tver- is the door to Moscow” was not an accident.
After Russian capital was moved from Moscow to Saint Petersburg- Tverskaya high-way became a connection between two capitals- old and a new one.
At first, small merchants and craftsmen built the ordinary-looking houses for themselves on Tverskaya street. Even later, in XVIII, when boyar estates, hotels, and fashionable stores were built on the street, appearance of this street of the old town has not changed much.
Tverskaya street was crooked and narrow and didn’t look like a front street- a road of the tsars, dignitaries, and foreign ambassadors.
Belinsky, a famous Russian critic, wrote: “Entering Moscow for the first time, our peterburzhets (resident of Petersburg) will enter a new world. Futilely, he will be looking for a main or the best Moscow street, which he could compare with the Nevsky prospect.
He will be shown Tverskaya street, where with amazement he will find himself in the middle of the crooked and narrow street, which will be laying down the hill, with the small site on one side, and the street on another. Even the biggest and most beautiful building of this street would have been considered modest in Saint Petersburg.
What would be the most surprising for a Peterburzhets, is a feeing that there is its own beauty in the strange grotesque of this old street …”
Russian
