Museums near The Water Museum

Science and nature · since 1706

The Apothecary Garden

outstanding

A garden in the middle of the city: five hundred metres to the Garden Ring, and the ground is not large. Founded by Peter I in 1706. Moscow had several such physic gardens, and every one of them except this vanished without trace, while the larch here, planted by tradition by Peter himself (an increment borer confirms an age of only two hundred years — our note), is alive still, though since a lightning strike early in the twentieth century it has hardly grown. The Palm House of 1891 is the centre of a tropical collection gathered over more than two hundred years.

Peter's larch, as the garden has always called it, stands in the middle of the arboretum. Beside it a pedunculate oak more than two hundred years old, limes past a hundred, and a rare weeping form of the Dahurian larch. The Palm House of 1891: palms, figs and pandanus at their full height. The Succulent House on the upper floor of the glasshouse block holds cacti, euphorbias, agaves and aloes, some of them among the rarest anywhere. The old pond with its water plants, the shade garden, the heather slope where the rockery used to be; the conifer slopes took a gold diploma of the landscape architecture prize in 2013.

5.6 km from here · Prospekt Mira 26, building 1 · ·

checked 20 August 2026 · No. 102

Architecture and estates · since 2020

The Narkomfin Building

significant

The 1930 house by Ginzburg and Milinis is the transitional commune-house with which any conversation about twentieth-century housing begins: two-level units, a corridor every second floor, kitchen and laundry taken out of the flat. Le Corbusier knew this building and leaned on it in the Unité d’habitation at Marseille — the ribbon window, the pilotis and the interlocking sections are all here first. But expectations must be squared honestly: the restoration of 2017–2020 gave the house back to its residents, and the museum here is one restored unit, not a building. Looking is done from outside and in a single flat, by appointment.

A restored type F unit, furnished to Ginzburg’s drawings. The building itself: the residential block on columns, the communal block, the bridge between them.

5.7 km from here · Novinsky Boulevard 25, block 1 · ·

· No. 74

Art · since 1981

The Museum of Decorative Art

significant

Lacquer miniature of four schools and propaganda porcelain — the objects by which Russia is recognisable in world decorative art. The material is first-rate; the display is not up to it.

Lacquer miniature — Palekh, Fedoskino, Mstyora, Kholuy; Soviet propaganda porcelain; toys of the peoples of the world; embroidery and samovars.

5.9 km from here · Delegatskaya 3, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 32

Unusual · since 1912

The Museum of Music

outstanding

One of the largest collections of musical instruments in the world and the only place in Russia where the instrument is shown as an object of history. One can go from horn and gusli to Murzin’s synthesiser, named with Scriabin’s initials — the machine on which the music for Solaris was written. Here too is kept the State Collection of unique instruments: Stradivari, Guarneri, Amati. The Horniman shows the instrument as ethnography and the Royal College of Music shows it as performance history; here both lines run in one room, and the electronic one continues them. One thing must be known: the collection is a working one, instruments are lent to musicians, and they are not always to be found in the case.

Instruments of the peoples of the world, from Russian gusli to the Japanese koto. The ANS synthesiser of Yevgeny Murzin, named with Scriabin’s initials. Autographs and manuscripts of Russian composers. The State Collection of stringed instruments, when it is in the museum.

6.2 km from here · Fadeyeva Street 4

· No. 65

Art · since 2015

The AZ Museum

significant

A one-artist museum, Anatoly Zverev, grown out of a private collection. Its value is not scale — the rooms are few and the works small — but the way of showing: an exhibition here is built as a statement, with sequence and light, rather than hung along the walls, and in Moscow that is rare. About Zverev himself an honest word is owed: an uneven artist, part of whose legacy rests on the speed of the hand rather than on depth, and his best things have to be picked out. The museum does not conceal this, which is why it is believed.

Painting and drawing by Anatoly Zverev from Natalia Opaleva’s collection. Exhibitions setting Zverev beside other artists of his circle. Work by Vladimir Nemukhin and other nonconformists.

6.2 km from here · 2nd Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street 20–22 · ·

· No. 73

Architecture and estates · since 1524

Novodevichy Convent

outstanding

After Kolomenskoye the second building of Moscow on the World Heritage list, and for wholeness of ensemble the first: a convent of the late seventeenth century has come down almost without rebuilding — walls, towers, gate churches, refectory. The Smolensk Cathedral of 1524 keeps sixteenth-century frescoes in their places and an iconostasis of a kind of which Moscow has two or three. What is not here is a museum in the ordinary sense: this is a working convent with a museum display, and what is open changes from season to season.

The Smolensk Cathedral of 1524 with its sixteenth-century wall painting and iconostasis. The walls and towers of the late seventeenth century — Moscow Baroque entire. The burial ground: Denis Davydov, Sergei Solovyov, and Chekhov before he was moved.

6.3 km from here · Novodevichy Proyezd 1

· No. 75

Unusual · since 2009

The Chocolate Museum

niche

An industrial tour rather than a museum: the value is the walk into the working shop and the history of Einem. As a collection it is next to nothing, and we do not hide that.

A walk into the working shop where sweets are wrapped in front of you; the history of Einem and Krasny Oktyabr in original wrappers and advertising.

6.4 km from here · Malaya Krasnoselskaya 7 (entrance from Lobachika 1, bldg 1) · ·

· No. 41

Architecture and estates · since 1923

Kolomenskoye

outstanding

The Church of the Ascension of 1532 is the first stone tented church in Russia and the only building in Moscow on the World Heritage list. The tent here is structure and not ornament, and sixteenth-century Russian architecture cannot be understood without having stood under it. The rest is a museum reserve with a middling collection: icons, tiles, manuscripts, wooden buildings brought from the North. And one warning: the palace of Alexei Mikhailovich shown in every photograph is a 2010 replica put up elsewhere in the park; it should not be confused with the real Kolomenskoye.

The Church of the Ascension, 1532. The Church of the Beheading of St John the Baptist at Dyakovo, sixteenth century, usually empty. The Front Gate with its display. Peter the Great’s cabin, brought from Arkhangelsk. Tiles and icons in the reserve’s exhibitions.

6.8 km from here · Andropova Prospekt 39 ·

· No. 69

Science and nature · since 1907

The Darwin Museum

significant

The oldest museum of evolution in Russia, built around an idea rather than around a case of stuffed animals: Kots collected proofs of variability, and the display serves the proof. It cannot match Vienna or Berlin for material, but its way of arguing stands on its own.

Early 20th-century taxidermy by Filipp Fedulov, among the finest anywhere; the collection of albinos and melanists gathered by Kots as visible proof of variability; the Living Planet hall.

7.3 km from here · Vavilova 57 · ·

· No. 57

History · since 2012

The Jewish Museum

significant

Come for two things at once: the Bakhmetevsky garage by Melnikov and Shukhov, a building of world significance, and the history of Russian Jewry told from inside as nowhere else. The holdings of originals are modest, and that is worth knowing beforehand.

The building itself — the Bakhmetevsky garage of 1926–1927, one of Konstantin Melnikov’s principal works with steel structures by Vladimir Shukhov; the Café on Basseynaya, a reconstruction of shtetl life.

7.4 km from here · Obraztsova 11, bldg 1a · ·

· No. 47