Moscow River

To the left of the bus you can see the Moscow River. In all it is 502 kilometres long, and 80 of those kilometres are within Moscow’s city limits.

It is interesting to consider what the word Moskva or Moscow means. And which came first – the name of the city or the name of the river? There are lots of theories on this point. But most historians have come to the same conclusion: the name of the river, or, if we are going to be academic about this, “the hydronym” came before the name of the city. “Hydronym” means something to do with water or dampness, or even a river. And that’s the same in many languages.

Muscovites use the river for all manner of things. For example, the famous restaurateur Stepan Krynkin salted cucumbers in the Moscow River. The secret lies in the fact that on the bottom the temperature stays almost the same all year round. And barrels of cucumbers lay at the bottom as if they were being refrigerated. Whether it was for this reason or not, the product was exclusively distributed to the Eliseevsky shops of which there were 3 – in Moscow, Petersburg and Paris.

Here’s another very popular question, especially in winter: why has the Moscow River not frozen over in the last few years even when the temperature drops well below zero? There are lots of theories, but no definitive answer. Even from officials dealing with official inquiries into this. Ecologists think that thre reason is warm waste water from industrial plants. And there is twice as much effluent as there is natural water.