Arbat

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.