The Sheremetev Hospice

On Bolshaya Sukharevskaya Square stands the Hospice House of Count Nikolai Sheremetev — one of the most majestic architectural ensembles of classical Moscow, conceived as an almshouse and free hospital, and known today as the building of the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Medicine.

The idea of founding a shelter for a hundred residents and an infirmary with fifty beds came to Count Sheremetev, one of the wealthiest men in Russia, in the early 1790s. The site chosen for construction was a plot known as the “Cherkassky Kitchen Gardens,” which he had inherited from his mother, the last representative of the senior line of the Cherkassky family. The institution’s charter was approved in 1803, but the formal opening did not take place until seven years later, on 28 June 1810; the first residents of the shelter were retired servicemen and impoverished townspeople.

The design of the building was commissioned from the Moscow architect Yelizvoy Nazarov, a pupil and assistant of Vasily Bazhenov, while construction from 1792 to 1807 was carried out by the serf architects Pavel Argunov, Alexei Mironov and Grigory Dikushin. The composition recalls a noble estate: the main block, with the Trinity Church and its semicircular belvedere, is set back into the depth of the courtyard, while two curved wings form a horseshoe-shaped courtyard of honour in front of it. In 1803 the count’s wife, Praskovya Zhemchugova, a former serf actress of his theatre, died, and after this loss the celebrated architect Giacomo Quarenghi was invited to work on the project, giving the building a memorial solemnity by designing the grand semicircular colonnade before the church directly from St Petersburg, without ever visiting the site. The interiors were adorned with marble and Ural stone, the dome of the church was painted by the artist Domenico Scotti, and a sculptural allegory of Mercy was placed within the colonnade.

When war broke out with Napoleon, the building was converted into a military hospital — at first wounded Russian soldiers were brought here, and after the occupation of Moscow, French soldiers as well. The Sheremetev family financed the upkeep of the shelter right up until the nationalisation of their estates in 1917, and in 1923 the Institute for Emergency Care was established on the basis of the hospital, later named after the surgeon Nikolai Sklifosovsky.

During the Soviet years the historic silhouette of the ensemble was disrupted by the neighbouring multi-storey institute building, erected in a manner typical of the late Soviet era; the interiors of the main block were partly remodelled, and the house church stood inactive for a long time. In 1996 an initiative arose to add the entire complex of the former Sheremetev Hospital to the UNESCO list, and by 2014 the house church of the Trinity had been fully restored and reconsecrated.

The Hospice House remains a rare Moscow example of private charitable architecture on an imperial scale: a monument to Count Sheremetev’s personal tragedy that has simultaneously served as a working hospital for more than two centuries, combining a memorial function with practical medical work that has not been interrupted even in the city’s most difficult years.