Today I’m featuring some facts about Moscow, There’s probably a lot that you don’t know about the biggest city in Russia, but today my aim is to change that.
Here are 18 Interesting facts about Moscow you might not have known
1. The city was established before 1147 AD. Yuri Dolgoruki is credited as the founder of the city.
2. Like I’ve already mentioned. it’s the largest city in Federal Russia with a population of over 12 million people. It’s the most populous city and is the largest urban and metropolitan area in Europe. It’s also the largest city by land area on the European continent.
3. It’s situated on the banks of the Moskva River. 49 bridges within the city’s limits cross the river.
4. The Red Square was originally a marketplace in the 15th century. The site was used for May Day parades during the reign of the Soviet regime and also houses Lenin’s mausoleum.
5. Gorky Park, a leisure and amusement park in Moscow stretches for 3 kilometers along the Moskva River was named after Maxim Gorky and was opened in 1928.
6. The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow was established in 1856 and is the largest depository of Russian fine art in the world. The gallery contains more than 130,000 exhibits.
7. St. Basil Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox cathedral on the Red Square was built between 1555 and 1561. It was the tallest building in the city before 1600.
8. It was the capital of Russia from 1480 until 1703, the capital of the USSR from 1922 until 1991 and became the capital of the Russian Federation in 1992. Between 1703 and 1922 St. Petersburg was the capital of Russia.
9. The Moscow Metro was opened in 1935 and is the world’s second most heavily used subway system behind the Tokyo subway system in Japan. Over 200 stations are in the subway network and an average of 6.6 million people use the Moscow Metro daily.
10. In 2008, Moscow ranked top on the list of most expensive cities for the third year in a row.
11. The city is famous for its cold and snowy winters, with temperatures often dropping to -20°C or lower.
12. The Moscow International Business Center, also known as Moscow-City, is a large business district located in the heart of the city, and features some of the tallest skyscrapers in Europe.
13. The city has a long and rich literary tradition, with famous writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov having lived and worked there.
14. The tallest building in Moscow is the Federation Tower. It’s actually comprised of two skyscrapers: the Vostok Tower and the Zapad Tower. The Vostok Tower is the tallest of the two, standing at a height of 374 meters (1,227 feet) and has 95 floors. It is also currently the tallest building in Europe. The Zapad Tower is slightly shorter, at 243 meters (797 feet) with 63 floors.
15. The oldest building in Moscow is the Assumption Cathedral located inside the Moscow Kremlin. It was built between 1475 and 1479 by the Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti. It was built under the orders of Grand Prince Ivan III, and it was originally intended to be the main church of the Russian Orthodox Church.
16. The discovery of the antimicrobial properties of penicillin was first reported in Moscow in 1928 by Alexander Fleming’s colleague, Dr. Sergius Winogradsky. Winogradsky noticed that the Penicillium mold that Fleming had been studying had the ability to kill bacteria, which led to the development of penicillin as a life-saving antibiotic.
17. The Moscow State University is where the first scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was invented in 1981 by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer. This invention revolutionized nanotechnology and earned the two scientists the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.
18. In 2013, scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow announced the discovery of a new type of mineral, which they named uakitite. The mineral was found in a meteorite that had crashed in the Uakit region of Russia in 2010, and its unique crystal structure made it unlike any other mineral previously known to science.
If I’ve left out anything important about Moscow, please comment on this post.
Watch this space for updates in the Facts category on Running Wolf’s Rant.
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