Arbat
Pedestrian street of poets and painters, once patrolled by trams and Soviet motorcades.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Arbat in Moscow follows poet and singer Bulat Okudzhava, who grew up in a cramped communal apartment just off this street and in 1959 wrote a song that made an ordinary Moscow street sound sacred. It traces the street's earlier life as a route for trams and Soviet government motorcades, and the moment in the early 1980s when it closed to traffic and became a pedestrian zone. Listen for the courtyards where buskers still gather, the same ones Okudzhava had already been singing about for decades.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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