Khitrovka

Khitrovka was a central Moscow district around Khitrov Square, existing roughly from 1820 to 1930. After 1860 the market that gave it its name became the city's best-known slum and gathering place for casual labourers; Vladimir Gilyarovsky described it in his 1926 book Moscow and the Muscovites as a survival world of beggars, broken actors, former clerks and thieves. Maxim Gorky gathered material here for The Lower Depths. A school now stands on the site of the market, but the surrounding ensemble of neoclassical tenements, the Morozov Hospital and a row of former doss houses is unusually well preserved and gives walkers a vivid picture of late tsarist Moscow.