The Housing Development of the Main Street of the Tver Kremlin in the First Years after the Fire of 1763 — an Almost Disappeared Legacy of the Second Half of the 18th Century

Abstract

Fires in the medieval Russian city were a frequent occurrence. They also happened in Modern times, but in the Catherine era, fires often became a starting point in the cardinal reform of the urban planning structure of the city. This fully affected Tver, which after the fire of 1763 became a kind of testing ground for the development of new “regular” planning principles. This article examines the results of this transformation for the oldest part of the city — its Kremlin. They were most visibly manifested in the organization of the development of the main Kremlin street, which in the first post-fire years changed its former name (“Bolshaya”) to Tverskaya “prespectiva”. However, already in the 1770s, Catherine street appeared on the maps of the city. In the time of Paul I, it became the Millionnaya, but by the early 1820s, Yekaterininskaya street returned to Tver toponymy, and from 1919 to the present, the main city highway exists as Sovetskaya street. The fire of 1763 “cleared” the main street of the Tver Kremlin of wooden buildings, therefore, building here “from scratch”, the Catherine town planners erected exclusively stone buildings on the red line of the renovated highway. And since the architectural team that worked in the capital of the Upper Volga region in the 1760s consisted mainly of representatives of the Moscow architectural school (including its head, Peter Romanovich Nikitin), the architecture of the buildings erected during this period was focused on Baroque forms, which in the middle of the 18^th century could be found in abundance in Moscow. Therefore, for clarity, the author suggests the reconstruction of that part of the main street of the Tver Kremlin, which was built up with stone two-storey buildings in the mid-60s — the first half of the 70s of the 18^th century, and which are currently far from the original architectural forms.

Keywords:

Tver Kremlin, Zagorodsky Posad, Tverskoi prospect, Yekaterininskaya, Millionnaya, Sovetskaya street, “regular” urban planning, late Baroque forms, residential development