Patriarch's Ponds
Historic city pond and park where a swamp for grazing goats became a patriarch's fish ponds, later immortalized as a devil's stage in a Soviet novel.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Patriarch's Ponds in Moscow opens with the legend many Muscovites swear they witnessed themselves: a tram, a crowd, and the death of the writer Berlioz in the opening pages of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. It follows how thoroughly that invented scene took hold, from Bulgakov's own wife's account of where the real streets ran to a researcher's dig through old newspapers, and reaches back to the seventeenth-century patriarch who first drained this ground for fish ponds. Find a bench near the water and listen from there, where the writers in the novel once sat.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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