Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure — Attraction in Yakimanka District

I plan to be a regular guest

Do you have favorite parks in Moscow? My choice is banal-poppin Gorky Park. Everything is there for people, for all occasions, tastes and moods. A million leisure options. And now one more. Not a hackneyed, exotic, straight new experience, exciting and memorable. I didn’t know anything about # atmasfera360. He lurked right next to the summer theater of Stas Namin (if you go from the main entrance to the park and go a little further, 50 meters, along the promenade). So while walking, do not pass by. It’s interesting there. The events organized by the guys are piece-exclusive, so you need to follow the poster so as not to miss. Many people heard and saw about the SAMSKARA project in ARTPLAY, and so this # ATMA360 is their work. Enough has I cast a shadow on the fence? )) Now there will be details of my journey with one yogi through the mystical universe. In order, the spherical cinema itself is a great attraction. I'm serious. I was rocked in places, as on a roller coaster and no less breathtaking. This is an interesting bodily experience. And once again she was convinced that the brain is not difficult to deceive, he himself is glad to be deceived. “You will not see the most important thing with your eyes, only one heart is vigilant.” This is the motto of my stage in life, and everything around him responds. So the film was not accidental. The creators (Igor Baranko - an animation artist and producer - George Aistov) swung at the visualization of the entire world order in the concept of Hinduism. I’ve heard about 6 worlds before, and in the animated film there are much more of them and not even all of them are included in it. Because the film suddenly breaks off at the 26th minute and at the most interesting place ... For to be continued .. in a year and a half) Great intrigue. For the uninitiated in the subject of Vedic culture, the content is difficult for perception, there each of the concepts indicated in the forwarding deserves a separate “cartoon” - karma, dharma, moksha, maya, Sansara, but I’m generally silent about the gods. But what a field for the artist’s imagination. This is not even the fantasy worlds of Tolkien. There can be anything and anything on those worlds, and this journey is a cool experience. The Spherical Cinema, 550 m2 Screen, a unique development of Fulldome.pro, surrounds the audience from all sides. Ultimate 4K image quality outperforms FullHD, as well as the technical capabilities of conventional modern movie theaters. Comfortable chairs are chaise lounges in which it is convenient to lie and watch what is happening and not to see any of the spectators. Cool sound and a journey into colorful worlds, beautiful and scary, sometimes at extreme speeds with the effect of presence and immersion. And although the chair does not rotate under you, there are enough impressions for yourself. I periodically closed my eyes and looked under my feet, returning myself to reality. And I also love all kinds of word and letter games, and here is the word atmosphere - I really, really like it. Atma - this is in Sanskrit - soul, spirit, self, real “I”, if very simplified. So atmAsphere in this place is really emotional and conducive to discoveries. Screenings of films are accompanied by interesting lectures, talks, and even refreshments - it seems they were fret (sweet coconut balls) and delicious tea, and at the entrance there is a sandalwood aroma of incense. It’s cool when all the senses are acted upon to make the effect stronger! I missed Tango events to the accompaniment of “Tango and Jazz” under 360 video projection. Does that...

Gorky Park is famous for many things, not many of them good. For Muscovites, their city's biggest green space used to be known as a place of regimented Soviet-era fun, full of strolling proletarian families eating cheap ice cream to the sound of military bands. To foreigners, it was the venue (and title) of Martin Cruz Smith's 1981 novel of faceless corpses and cutthroat Soviet black marketeering. And then of course there was that Scorpions song—"follow the Moskva, down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind, of chaaaaange," etc.

To me, it was mostly famous as a place to avoid. As a young reporter for The Moscow Times back in the mid-1990s, I'd nearly been beaten up there by drunken paratroopers. Gorky Park was where poor Muscovites would take cheap dates—a wilderness of garish carnival rides, loud pop music, and overpriced kebabs. Moscow's Night Wolves biker gang, the local answer to the Hell's Angels, had their lair in the park's depths. And you had to pay to go in, despite it being one of the few large public spaces in the capital.

But this summer the "wind of change" has again come to Gorky Park. In place of cheesy funfairs, drunken soldiers, and an apocalyptic wasteland of post-Soviet broken concrete, the park is now full of free-Wi-Fi-using, bicycling, nonalcoholic-mojito-sipping young things catching the late-summer rays. The health-and-safety-defying carnival rides are gone, replaced by rose gardens and fountains (they had actually been there all along, it turned out, but the rides had been built over them.) The lawns are strewn with giant beanbags designed for lounging on with a laptop, and in place of the '90s-era prefab booths, the management has put up wooden reproductions of the original 1930s Constructivist-style kiosks selling juices and sandwiches, but no vodka. The banks of the Moscow River, which runs for three miles along one side of Gorky Park, has an urban beach modeled on Paris's Seine-side plages. A couple of adventurous Frenchwomen have even set up an open-air pétanque alley.

Hence my amazement at the new Gorky Park, brainchild of current Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and his appointee as the park's new director, Sergei Kapkov. Instead of turning the park into a patchwork of fenced-off, money-spinning elitny preserves, Kapkov has created a truly great public space with no other ambition but to improve the quality of life of regular Muscovites.

Of course, this comes with a bit of a caveat: the only people who can afford to forbear making a fast buck are those who've made a few fast bucks already. In this case, the godfather of Gorky is oil billionaire Roman Abramovich. Kapkov is a close ally (he served as a member of Parliament for the Arctic region of Chukotka while Abramovich was governor). And Abramovich's girlfriend, Dasha Zhukova, plans to open a world-class contemporary-arts center in a historic exhibition hall in Gorky...

Gorky Park, located at Krymsky Val (ru) and situated just across the Moskva River from Park Kultury Metro station, opened in 1928. The park followed the plan of Konstantin Melnikov, a world-famous Soviet avant-garde and constructivist architect, and amalgamated the extensive gardens of the old Golitsyn Hospital (ru) and of the Neskuchny Palace, covering an area of 300 acres (120 ha) along the river.[1] The history of the Neskuchny Garden can be traced back to 1753, when it emerged in the area between Kaluzhskaya Zastava and Trubetskoy Moskva river-side estate. The neighboring area to Neskuchny Garden, from Krymsky Val to Neskuchny Garden, received little attention right up until the 1920s. Initially it was covered with park gardens, meadows and vegetable gardens belonging to the owners of neighboring estates. It formed a wasteland by the end of the 19th century, and served as a waste heap.

The First All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Industries Exhibition opened in 1923 on the wasteland that had been cleared during the course of communist community work days. A resolution for the exhibition was passed[by whom?] on 19 October 1922 and the exhibition opened one and a half years later on 19 May 1923. After bidding for the exhibition's layout plan, which proposed four arrangements — Sokol, Khodynskoye Pole, Petrovsko-Razumovsky park and the river areas near Krymsky bridge — preference was given to the last option.

On 15 March 1928 by a resolution of the Presidium of the Moscow Council, the Agricultural and Handicraft Industries Exhibition was enlarged and transformed into the Central Park of Culture and Leisure — the country’s first park of its kind, which was referred to as an outdoor "cultural enterprise". In 1932 the park was named after M.A. Gorky. The idea of a need for a central park of culture and leisure in Moscow arose in the late 1920s in relation to Moscow's reconstruction with notions of a socialist "city of...