Nikol'skaya Ulitsa
Pedestrian shopping street where Russia's first printing house once stood, home to a soaring Baroque print-yard facade.
Location
About this audio guide
A workshop burns on this Moscow street one night, and nobody is quite sure it was an accident. This guide to Nikolskaya Ulitsa follows Ivan the Terrible's order to build Russia's first print shop here in 1553, deacon Ivan Fyodorov's 1564 printing of the first dated Russian book, and the city's scribes who saw the new craft as a threat to their livelihood and turned the neighborhood against him. An English visitor at the time called the fire arson, though historians still argue the point.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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