Moscow (part 1) - city's underground: Metro

It was a short - one week - trip to Moscow. Someone told me that three days to see Moscow was enough. No way. At least when you really want to see it, feel it, visit important galleries and walk a bit the city. And Moscow is a perfect city for walking. At least the centre of it that gives you probably a couple of hundreds of kilometres to walk.

One week was definitely not enough to see the most important places. But I treat it as a start. A reconnaissance.

Moscow is quite easy to travel around, especially by metro. And as probably many of you know the stations are marvellous there. One could easily spend a day or at least half of it travelling from one station to another (and there are a total of 185 of them) and enjoy the kind of trip. You'd better do it off the peak hours though I would not know when it is. Perhaps some time after 10 pm. And I guess weekends would be calmer. Unless you like the crowd bumping around while you do not hurry anywhere. It's fun, too.

So here's my little trip in the Moscow underground.

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It's not metro for the beginning but aeroexpress to the airport. They go to all the civilian airports around Moscow. That one took us from and to Domodedovo. Comfortable, clean, relatively fast (around 45 minutes one way), direct between Paveletskaya Station and Domodedovo, costs 640 (or so) roubles which is some 70 zl.

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Paveletskaya is the station closest to where we lived. There's a train station and a metro station. The latter looks as follows:

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Paveletskaya: The trains come every 3-5 minutes at all stations. The shortest intervals are 1,5 min. Which is basically a train directly following a train. It is very efficient way to transport some 8 milion people a day.

This particular station is generally in marble. There used to be a bronze roundel with the image of Lenin and Stalin at the end of the central hall, but it was later replaced by a mosaic panel with a worker and a peasant.

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That is Novoslobodskaya Station,'cause it's near Novoslobodskaya street. It's also made of marble but what is interesting it has those 32 beautiful stained glass panels with an ornamental brass border illuminated from within.

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It's a fragment of Ploshchad Revolutsii station. The pylons of the station hall form 18 arches and in the nieches in these arches there are 76 human size bronze sculptures presenting people reading books, farmers, sportsmen, mothers, etc. There was originally a relief of Stalin but later it was removed.

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Arbatskaya Station, obviously next to Arbat Street. Grey granite floor and white and black track walls of glazed tiles. Floral reliefs and the station is lit by bronze chandeliers (beautiful). And - surprise, surprise - there used to be mosaic of Stalin here as well. Long gone, as in the other cases.
It's on the longest line that goes 43 kilometres.

 

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Prospect Mira has a theme: development of agriculture in the USSR. The pylons are made of light-coloured marble with a ceramic relief of leaves and a vine. Amazing lamps - again.

 

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Biblioteka Imeni Lenina - that is more or less the name of the station. Not particularly nice - yellow ceramic tiles and yellow marble and portrait of Lenin from the 70. Nice buritos in the fast food bar there, though.

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Komsomolskaya is one of those two-storeys station. Two galleries are located on both sides of the station above the tracks and they are connected by passenger bridges spanning the station hall. It does look a bit like in some fancy palace.

 

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Komsomolskaya: Ceramic tiles and columns covered with yellow-brown marble. The name comes to commemorate the role of Komsomol youth league in the construction of the first metro line.

It was the first time a majolica panel was used to decorate a metro station and this panel depicted heroic labour of the Komsomol members who helped to build the metro.

 



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Komsomolskaya: There are almost 35.000 people employed in the Moscow Metro. An average passenger travels 13 kilometres a day in almost 10.000 trains that run every day.

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And Mayakowskaya. Kasia said it's the most beautiful station in her opinion. I agree in view of what I have seen. Elegant, tasty, rich. Got its name after a poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Pylons covered with stainless steel. Pillar corners lined with stone and marbled limestone. The floor has a pattern of white marble and grey and pink granite.

The vault has oval niches with brilliant ceiling mosaics and thir theme is "24 Hours in the Land of the Soviets".

The design of the station won a Grand Prix at the New York World Trade Fair in 1938.

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Mayakovskaya again: It is 33 meters beneath the surface. It has a unique architecture, or rather pioneer architecture. I can't explain the details but it is the first of the kind as far as pillars and pylons are concerned.

That station became famous during WWII because it served as an air raid shelter.

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Some stations are magnificent, others - less. Like Sportivnaya (below). And I would not be totally fair to end the story here because the station underground looks much better than what we see above the ground level.

And there is - allegedly - a secret entrance to a secret emergency evacuation line in that particular station.

Some say that there is a deeper metro system to evacuate the most important people in the state in case of emergency like for example a nuke bomb atack. It is said to be in the hands of military and connects Kremlin as well as Lubyanka where the FSB headquarters and the Ministry of Defence are. One of the entrances is supposed to be behind the Sportivnaya station. I haven't seen it myself although there was a lot of police or military around the station.

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And to end the story - a newspaper dispenser at the station.

 

 

Hope you enjoyed the trip.

Next (soon) - Moscow (part 2)  by night, less babbling. Just photos. Mostly :) Watch the space!