Hermitage Garden

Hermitage Garden stretches along Karetny Ryad Street — one of Moscow’s oldest pleasure gardens and a landmark of landscape garden art, home today to three theatres at once. Over its history, the garden has served as the birthplace of the famous Moscow Art Theatre, the site of the city’s first film screening, and a stage for stars of world renown.

The garden was founded in 1892 by theatrical impresario and patron Yakov Shchukin on the site of a previously neglected wasteland. The summer garden, called “New Hermitage,” opened in June 1894, and by December of the same year a winter theatre was already operating, built to a design by architect Vasily Zagorsky, author of the Moscow Conservatory building. The layout of the garden itself and its open-air stages was handled by architect Alexander Belevich. For the opening, Shchukin ordered a private diesel power plant from abroad — the first in Moscow — and decorated the pathways with decorative lamps fitted with electric arc lights.

It was here that Moscow’s first public screening of the Lumière brothers’ films took place on May 26, 1896, and on October 14, 1898, the premiere of Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich marked the opening of what would become the famous Moscow Art Theatre, then known as the Public-Accessible Art Theatre: its first four seasons took place on this stage, including the premieres of Chekhov’s The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. Feodor Chaliapin and Anna Pavlova performed in the garden, Sergei Rachmaninoff made his conducting debut here, and Sarah Bernhardt and illusionist Harry Houdini toured with performances.

By 1909, the garden had expanded significantly: the large summer “Mirror” theatre was built to a design by architect Alexander Novikov, and construction began on a new winter building. After the revolution, in 1918, the garden was nationalized and handed over to Proletkult structures, and two decades later the old winter theatre building was rebuilt by architects Mikhail Posokhin and Ashot Mndoyants, who removed the former lobby in favor of an open colonnade.

Today the garden is home to the Hermitage Theatre, founded on this stage in 1987; the New Opera theatre, opened in the rebuilt “Mirror” theatre building in 1997; and the Sfera drama theatre, based here since 1981. Original lamp bases bearing the monogram “ЯЩ” — the founder’s initials — have survived, and the garden’s monuments include busts of Victor Hugo and Dante Alighieri, gifts from the municipalities of Paris and Rome. In 2022, the last surviving pre-revolutionary structure in the garden — the historic Shchukin Stage, damaged by fire back in 2008 — was demolished.

Hermitage Garden remains a living witness to an entire era of Moscow’s cultural life — from pre-revolutionary tours by world stars to the modern repertoire of three active theatres today. Few urban spaces can boast such a dense concentration of landmark cultural events along the very same paths.