|
Saturday, 28.07.2007
Novodevichy Convent and Cemetery: Where Russia’s celebrities are buried
The Novodevichy (‘new virgin’) Convent was built in 1524 to the southwest of the city centre, and its red and white walls and its church’s domes make it Moscow’s most beautiful sacred building. Its name derived from a market place where in the Middle Ages Russian girls had been sold to the Tatars’ harems.
|
|
The Novodevichy cemetery, located directly behind the convent wall, is one of Moscow’s most interesting sights.
|
As a celebrities’ cemetery, it was closed to the public for many years. Now you can stroll past the graves of the great and good of the distant and recent past:
|
|
| Information |
The Novodevichy Convent is today again a working convent inhabited by nuns.
The convent
Nowodevitschii pr-d 1,
Tel. 246-85-26, 246-22-01,
Nearest metro station Sportivnaya
Can be visited daily, 10am-5pm, except on Tuesdays
|
|
Here lie the ancestors of traditional Muscovite families, but also Soviet celebrities such as the aeroplane designers Ilyushin and Tupolev, Stalin’s Foreign Minister Molotov, the brilliant writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Schalyapin the famous tenor.
|
Communist Party head Khrushchev is also buried here, which constituted demotion for him, since General Secretaries usually found their eternal peace behind the Lenin Mausoleum at the Kremlin wall.
|
Raissa Gorbachova was buried here and it is now also Boris Yeltsin’s last resting place.
|
|
