Kitay-Gorod

This guide to Kitay-Gorod in Moscow opens with the popular myth that the name meant Chinatown, then turns to the real story: a defensive wall raised in the fifteen-thirties by the boy-regent Elena Glinskaya, mother of the future Ivan the Terrible, using an Italian military architect the Russians called Petrok Maly. You'll hear the rival theories for where the name actually came from, and how Stalin's planners had the wall dismantled in the nineteen thirties to clear the way for Moscow's new metro. Best heard walking the streets where merchants once traded behind those thirteen towers.