Manor or Averki Kirillov (Moscow)

 interesting place, nonresidential building, 18th century construction, 17th century construction, object of cultural heritage of federal importance (Russia)

colorful two-story Manor of Averki Kirillov, which was built between 1656 and 1657 and rebuilt between 1703 and 1711. It is constructed of red bricks and decorated with carved white stone and colored tiles. The unusual deep persimmon red-orange front porch juts out from the facade.

Apparently pleased with the landscape architect's work in the Royal Gardens, Ivan the Great presented a man known only as Kirill with land along the Moscow riverfront. As the city expanded, and the Tsar's Garden was appropriated for other uses, his grandson, Averki Kirillov (1622-1682) built this grand residence on the stone foundations of his grandfather's 16th century home. Kirillov, who was Secretary of the Duma, was also a very successful salt merchant at the Solyany Dvor, or Salt Exchange, a government monopoly that once stood where the House on the Embankment stands today. And like his grandfather, Averki Kirillov was a close friend of the Tsar, then Aleksei I, Peter the Great's father. Kirillov was killed during the Streltsi rebellion against Peter the Great and was buried near the chapel on the estate.

After his death, Kirillov's house passed to his son's wife, who married again, this time to Aleksei Kurbatov. Beginning in 1703, Kurbatov spent the next twenty years building the Kremlin's Arsenal. At some point before Peter the Great prohibited building in stone outside of St. Petersburg, Kurbatov remodeled the north facade with a Dutch gable in the baroque style of Western masters.

Until the mid 18th century the Kurbatov family owned the house. Then, when the last Kurbatov died without heirs, it became a government building. Its first use was as home for the alcohol control board, whose job was to make sure that wine was not diluted, taverns were not illegally operated and drunkenness was combated. After that, it served as an archive for the Senate, and later as the home to the Tsar's Archeological Society.

With the 1917 Revolution, the aristocratic archeological society deserted the mansion, and it became a dormitory. When Boris Iofan was designing the House of the Embankment, he planned to locate a kindergarten on the site. With the threat of demolition, Moscow intelligentsia appealed to the Kremlin on behalf of the mansion and church, and it was saved. After World War II, the estate housed the Scientific Institute of Culture, and the house underwent a series of archeological explorations and incomplete renovations.

Today the mansion is occupied by the Russian Institute for Cultural Research whose mission "is to embrace the whole system of culture, irrespective of its departmental or traditional scientific affiliation: from museums and monuments to the film industry, television and the newest information technologies, from the study of local history and folklore to art and mass culture." (20 Bersenievskaya Naberezhnaya)