Moscow museums · History
History · since 1859
The Romanov Chambers
The Chambers of the Romanov Boyars
One of the first museums in Russia: it opened in 1859, thirteen years before the Historical Museum, and opened already as a reconstruction of boyar life — an idea unheard of at the time. What is to be looked at is not authenticity down to the nail but the conception itself: how the middle of the nineteenth century pictured the seventeenth, and what came of it. Barry and Pugin were building Westminster in those same decades, and the case is the same — a century imagining an earlier one and building it in earnest. The collection meanwhile is real: furniture, vessels, textiles, tiles. Together with the Old English Court two steps away, this is the best pair in Moscow about the city before Peter.
Minimum route
45 minutes – 1 hour
Founded
1859
Ticket
from ₽350
What to see
The sixteenth-century undercroft, the one genuine part of the building. The interiors recreated by Richter in the 1850s: the dining chamber, the boyarynya’s room, the light room. Tiled stoves, chests, vessels and textiles of the seventeenth century.
Minimum route — 45 minutes – 1 hour for the essentials
An hour.
- 15 minutesthe undercroft: what is genuinely old.
- 30 minutesthe chambers floor by floor, from the men’s side to the women’s.
- 15 minutesthe yard and Varvarka around it: four buildings of four different centuries stand here in a row.
Reference
About the museum
A house on a sixteenth-century undercroft, held to be the Romanovs’ family court. By the will of Alexander II, Fyodor Richter restored it in 1856–1859 as the “house of the Romanov boyars” — the first attempt in Russia at a museum reconstruction of daily life. Now a branch of the Historical Museum.
The building
The sixteenth-century undercroft is genuine, the upper part is Richter’s work. That makes the building a monument twice over: as the remnant of a boyar court, and as a monument to nineteenth-century ideas of antiquity.
Good to know
The upper floors are reconstruction, and the museum does not conceal it. Come here for “the real seventeenth century” and you may be disappointed; come for the history of how that century was imagined, and you will not.
What to read
Richard Wortman, “Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy” — why a tsar of the 1850s needed a boyar house, and what he wanted read in it. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
ISBN 9781400849697
Getting in
How to get there
Metro Kitay-Gorod, five minutes down Varvarka. The Old English Court is next door — the two are best seen in one visit.
Opening times
Check the hours on the site of the State Historical Museum.
When to go
Weekdays. The museum is small and fills quickly at weekends; on Varvarka at the same hours come the streams from Zaryadye.
Contacts
Of interest to children
Chambers, chests, tiles and low vaults are intelligible to children and are liked. From 8.
· No. 77