Neskuchny Garden

Neskuchny Garden, on the right bank of the Moskva River, is the largest landscape park in Moscow’s historic center, covering 59.3 hectares, preserved from a group of noble estates and recognized as a monument of landscape gardening art. Today it forms the oldest part of Gorky Park, and its boundaries took shape in the first third of the 19th century from three neighboring estates purchased by the palace administration of Nicholas I.

The founding of the estate is traced to 1728, when Prince Nikita Trubetskoy acquired the land near the Kaluga Gate; the estate was nicknamed “Neskuchnoye” (“never boring”) for its lavish receptions. Nearby, in the mid-18th century, the industrialist Prokofy Demidov laid out a six-terrace botanical amphitheater garden with more than two thousand plant species, considered by many to be the finest on the continent. According to legend, the flowers were guarded from theft by serfs painted white, who posed as statues and came to life whenever an intruder approached. After Demidov’s death the estate belonged to Prince Vyazemsky and then to the Counts Orlov, who built a summer theater seating fifteen hundred. Between the estates lay a plot belonging to the Golitsyns, the last to be annexed; in 1842 the whole complex passed to the imperial family under the name Neskuchny Garden.

From the estate era, the ensemble of the Alexandrinsky Palace survives — the former Demidov house, now housing the presidium of the Academy of Sciences, with a fountain by sculptor Ivan Vitali in front of its façade. The garden also contains the rotunda of the Hunting Lodge (18th century), the Orlovs’ Tea House, the domed Bathing Pavilion with its Classical grotto, and decorative bridges. The former estate riding hall now houses the Fersman Mineralogical Museum, and the park’s fence was erected in 1935 to a design by Vitaly Dolganov.

In 1923, a large exhibition complex dedicated to the country’s achievements in agriculture and handicrafts was built on this land — architects Ivan Zholtovsky, Alexei Shchusev, and Alexander Kuznetsov worked on the project; of the structures from that time, only Zholtovsky’s “Machine-Building” pavilion has been partially preserved. In 1928 the garden became part of the first Soviet park of culture and leisure, and from 1932, when the park was named after Maxim Gorky, an open-air Green Theater seating 20,000 operated here. In the 1990s the garden became the site of annual gatherings of Tolkien fans known as “Egladore.”

Today the garden has walking paths, tennis courts, a football pitch, a chess club, and a co-working space, while the Hunting Lodge has been used since 1990 as the set for the TV game show “What? Where? When?” The Bathing Pavilion by the pond has stood empty since the 1960s and was damaged by a fire in 2003, though restoration design work has been underway since 2015. In December 2017 the ensemble of estate buildings was placed under state protection as a single cultural heritage site.

Neskuchny Garden remains a rare surviving example in Moscow of an 18th–19th century noble landscape park, woven into the fabric of a Soviet and modern city park. The combination of old estate layouts, Classical-era monuments, and active recreation areas makes it one of the capital’s most historically layered spaces.