by Olga BAZANOVA, journalist The village of Kolomenskoye, within Moscow city limits today, is the site of a major historical and architectural Restoration complex now comprising also the Lefortovo, Lyublino and Izmailovo suburban estates. Back in 1923 Pyotr Baranovsky, an eminent restoration artist and architect, founded a Folk Creativity Museum over there, at Kolomenskoye, a country estate of the Russian czars in the 14th through 17th centuries. Kolomenskoye and other suburban estates were granted their present museum-and-preserve status in 2005. стр. 83 This is an Elysian place indeed amid the big city hustle and bustle. This is the tranquility of sylvan glades and groves of oak- and maple-trees, of regular lines of apple-trees... of flower gardens, with lush lawns here and there... A place of lovely nature walks paved in stone blocks... All this just beside the rolling river Moskva. A wonderful setting for a park and its "toys" and "playthings" popping out of a magic box, as it were. "Toys", "playthings"–that's what one called churches, tower-chambers, belfries, pavilions and other wonders in the 17th century. Feast your eyes on them, walk in and climb up the steep brick-paved staircases and inspect exhibits, the see-and-touch things. A thrilling travel down the memory lane into the dim and distant past. Experts say these scenic parts were inhabited as far back as the New Stone Age, i.e. between 5,000 to 3,000 B.C. Quite a few settlements sprung up there closer to the Common Era, in the first millennium B.C.– in particular, the Dyakovo gorodishche (encampment, site of ancient town) giving its name to an old village now not out there and to the archeological culture of Dyakovo.* In the 11th to 12th centuries A.D. this was the site of an old Russian settlement, one of the earliest in what is now Moscow. The village of Kolomenskoye was first mentioned in the will of Prince Ivan Kalita in * This culture took in the basin of the Uppe ... Читать далее