Ryazan in photos:
a century ago and today

On the left is Astrakhanskaya Street at the beginning of the 20^th century. On the right is Lenin Street, well-known to all Ryazan citizens. If not for the building in the front, the place would be hard to recognise. The old photo features a line of almost countryside type houses vanishing into the distance. On the new photo, almost all buildings in the front are from the Soviet era or built at the turn of the 21^st century, even though they do not seem to be, at first. The nearest house was built at the beginning of the 19^th century in the classic style, but its current appearance is attributed to the early 20^th century – the peak of the bourgeois age. Back then, it housed the Nobles' Land Bank and Peasants' Land Bank. The balcony above the entrance was demolished, but the lobed dome on the top luckily survived the Soviet period, though most of such architectural extravagances were taken down in order to facilitate roof maintenance. Nobody felt like clearing the domes and the turrets from snow. This street is the starting point of the road from Ryazan to Astrakhan, which explains the old name. Before the railway construction in the 1860's, an important trade route from Moscow to Astrakhan had passed through Ryazan in this street. No ring roads around the city were built back then. In the second half of the 19^th century, Astrakhanskaya Street and adjacent neighbourhoods transformed into the downtown district hosting banks, offices, hotels, and other urban amenities.

The photo on the left was taken in the early 20^th century from the Astrakhan Bridge over Lybed. The bridge is still in its place, while the river was confined to a pipe since the 1960's. This photo features three famous buildings, almost unchanged over the course of a hundred years. The building with a half rotunda on the left is the Ryazan Region Duma, former assembly of nobility. The three-storey building with a corner bay window and a balcony is the Steyert hotel, built in 1890 and rebuilt in the modernist style in the 1900's. This hotel was considered to be one of the most luxurious hotels in the city, even Feodor Chaliapin used to be among its guests. In the 1930's it housed government security officers and it is still the local FSB quarters. On the right of the photo is the Ryazan branch of the State Bank captioned in the old postcard. Today, the building hosts the city's arbitration court. The old photo gives a very good view of the metal guard rails to prevent carriages from running over the pavement. Today, the heavy guard rails have been replaced with light-weight fencing. A pole with 13 horizontal bars and a variety of insulators is a telephone & telegraph pole.

A typical example of the changes that a central town of a governorate went through over a century. The once deserted road is now replaced by busy – sometimes overly busy – traffic. The city skyline is a mess of wires, but there is less outdoor advertising seen on buildings, which, by the way, stay mostly intact: only one in the end finally gave way to a Stalin-era house, and the second house from the corner had a new storey added during the Soviet times.

The street was named after the Governorate's first post office. The three-storey building has house signs "Central Hotel Rooms" and "Fancy Smallware by Gavrilov Brothers" dating back to the pre-Revolutionary times. In the 1990s, Pochtovaya Street turned into a pedestrian street paved with cobblestones, with a row of street lamps in the middle.

The street's name speaks for itself: it is the road that leads to Ryazan from Moscow. The overall street view remains unchanged, with trees just as high and the house even preserving its brick chimney. A stark contrast is the traffic – no way to casually walk down the middle of the road! The long three-storey house with a chimney has been owned by the military for more than a century now. In the early 19^th century, it was home to the Volkhovsky regiment of the Ryazan garrison and was informally referred to as "six-company barracks". Today, the building hosts the military prosecutor's office, military court, and an out-patient department of a military hospital.

Hence, Yamskaya Sloboda lies on the periphery of Ryazan's historic centre. Unlike Moskovskaya Street, this district underwent serious changes that dramatically changed its original look. As a result, the street is now lined with five-storey apartment blocks dating back to the crusade against architectural excesses (the 1950–1960s) rather than the neat rows of old two-storey merchant houses. Photos taken in the early 20^th century show that Sloboda's streets were not even cobbled. On top of that, there was a drainage ditch running smack in the middle of the main road. One can easily imagine how many carriages would get stuck here when bad weather turned the road into a swamp of dirt.

Along with Astrakhanskaya Street, Yamskaya Sloboda formed part of the road from Moscow to Astrakhan. On 30 May 1819, Russian Emperor Alexander I made a stop here on his way back from the south of the country to "have a short break in a small neat cottage". To mark this event, a chapel was built. Even though it was brought down after 1917, Yamskaya Sloboda's Saint Nicholas Church survived the revolution and to this date remains the highest building in the street. A decision to build a church in the coachman quarter was taken in the late 18^th century. Bricks of the destroyed Church of Saint Nicholas the Wet which used to stand on the bank of the flood prone Trubezh River came in handy as the construction material. The church was commissioned in 1788, however the bell tower was not completed until 1822.

Ryazan's main school traces its history back to 1894 when Vera Yekimetskaya, daughter of the local doctor, opened educational courses in her house on Myasnitskaya (currently Gorky) Street. To teach students more effectively, Ms Yekimetskaya had to rent a house on Astrakhanskaya Street. The school was transformed into a gymnasium for women in 1901, with a dedicated three-storey brick building completed in 1904. The latter has been preserved to our days. The gymnasium offered teaching in Russian, French, German, theology, writing, handicrafts, geography, Russian history, mathematics, physics, arithmetics, vocal techniques and natural scienes.

Below is the breakdown of the gymnasium's students by their social class:

• daughters of hereditary nobles – 151,
• daughters of personal nobles and civil servants – 71,
• daughters of clergymen – 30,
• daughters of freemen and merchants – 104,
• daughters of petty bourgeois and craftsmen – 157,
• daughters of peasants – 150.

Similar to other private gymnasiums, the education was fee-based.

One of the few views of Ryazan that have barely changed over the years. In the centre of the picture there is a building of progymnasium constructed in the 1880s. In 1904, it became male gymnasium No. 2, while, in the Soviet times, it transformed into school No. 7, under which name it has been known ever since. Even the small single-storey house on the left side of it has survived. There is one catch, though: instead of the beautiful carved gate it features ugly metal fencing now.

Today, the farthermost point of the Kremlin's wall offers a fairly bleak view of the Soviet-era five-storey apartment blocks. Lost among them is an old two-storey house which serves as a link between different historical epochs. In the old postcards it is surrounded by churches, chapels, an uncrowded square and rows of houses farther aside. This is the Old Market Square. Starting from the 16^th century, it was the city's main marketplace until traders moved to the far end of the Moscow Route in the late 18^th century (the New Market is current Lenin Square). Smack in the middle of the Old Market there was St Simeon Church. In the old photograph its belfry lurks behind the red building on the left side. The church was closed in 1924 and then used as a bakery warehouse before being demolished for good. Farther away, behind St Simeon Church, one can see the gate bell tower of Kazan Monastery, which was later transformed into a residential building. Just a bit to the right, in the background, there is an unhindered view of the Resurrection Church, which later gave place to the Freedom Square. There is also a white two-storey house peeking in the photograph from behind the right wing of the red brick building. It has survived and now stands on the corner of Griboedov and Skomoroshinskaya Streets. All the other houses and churches have been demolished. The Old Market Square was renamed as 26 Baku Commissars and downsized in the 1960s giving space to a residential quarter.

In the early 1970s, Ryzan's Service Centre was built on the corner of Lenin and Liebknecht Streets. A fine example of Soviet modernism, it has not weathered the grind of the last 25 years very well: some say that the building's single-piece glass windows would only get washed once in every five years. With no refurbishment plans in sight, the Service Centre was reconstructed in the 2000s becoming a fairly mediocre piece of architecture. Currently it houses the Atron Shopping Mall.