The capital of Russia — Moscow is a well-known tourist center. Many people every year visit the Red Square, Moscow Kremlin, Tretyakov Art Gallery, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow Metro. But the area around Moscow is also very interesting for tourism. Inhabitants of Russia call this area Podmoskoviye (literally it means an area around Moscow). Such verbal construction is used in Russian for environs of Moscow city only (as, for-example, Americans use construction like New Yorker for the people of New York city only). Moscow area is located in the central part of the East European Plain (also called the Russian Plain) in interfluve of the Volga River and the Oka River in mixed coniferous forest terrestrial zone. Podmoskoviye is not only suburbs of contemporary Moscow and the Moscow Region but also some places of other Russian regions geographically and historically connected with Moscow.
There are many amazing and beautiful places in the Moscow area. These are old monasteries that were both fortresses and centers of enlightenment in the Middle Ages, palace and estate architectural ensembles with indispensable parks and gardens, unique corners of Central Russian nature. Since ancient times Russian service class people (noblemen) received from the state land with peasants and lived on the income from these lands. Traditional Russian estate is a manor house with services, garden, vegetable garden, park. Each landowner had his own little pride: first-class dogs, a cascading pond with carps, a wine cellar, or, for-example, the best blacksmith in the county. Many masterpieces of Russian literature were created on base of the material of the estate life (Died Soul by Nikolai Gogol, Fathers and Children and other novels by Ivan Turgenev, Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy).
Since late XIX-early XX centuries the area around Moscow became very popular recreation zone. Russian noblemen had to devide their spacious but unprofitable estates for small dacha lots. That’s why many well-to-do in the slightest degree Moscow citizens received opportunity to rent small cottages for summer season. The process of Russian aristocratic landowners ruin is discribed in one of the most known Russian plays: The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (1903). In Soviet period dacha settlements were built in the best places of the Moscow region for the Soviet elite-academicians, generals, top party leadership, ballet and theater artists, writers (famous writer’s village Peredelkino). Ordinary employees of Moscow enterprises received more modest cottages (a small wooden house with out-door facilities and water from standpipe or from well) but dacha became very popular and actualy mass kind of summer recreation in the USSR.
The most popular places of interest around Moscow every year attracting many tourists from all corners of the world are Anton Chekhov’s house in Melikhovo, Pyotr Tchaikovsky house in Klin, Leo Tolstoy’s estate in Yasnaya Polyana, old Russian town Kolomna, famous Orthodox monasteries in Sergiev Posad, Istra, Zvenigorod, Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Traning Center (Star City), the Prioksko-Terrasny Nature Biosphere Reserve.
