A “cellar” with unique items was found in an old building near Arbat

Among the things discovered there are fragments of sculptures

Another secret of old Moscow has become smaller. During the restoration of the house where the famous Russian and Soviet sculptor Nikolai Andreev once lived, workers discovered a cache filled with various artifacts.

The building, which is located on Bolshoy Afanasyevsky Lane, was built in 1893 according to the design of the famous architect Alexander Kaminsky. For almost a third of a century – from 1900 to 1932 – the sculptor N. Andreev lived in it, who became famous in his time as a monumentalist – the author of sculptural monuments to Soviet leaders and outstanding Russian figures of literature and art.

Now specialists are carrying out preventive repairs in the house, which has the status of a cultural heritage site of federal significance. It was thanks to this that we managed to make a very interesting find by chance.

The head of the capital’s Department of Cultural Heritage, Alexey Emelyanov, spoke about the incident on the Moscow government portal: “As part of the emergency work, specialists dismantled the old linoleum and rotten floor boards, and underneath them there was a concrete cellar completely filled with various objects.”

Among the items discovered in the cellar, fragments of plaster sculptures were mentioned: heads, other parts of statues and bas-reliefs of Lenin, Stalin and Mayakovsky, as well as furniture parts, glazed tiles, books and other objects from the early twentieth century.

“It is not surprising that a significant part of the “treasure” consisted of elements of sculptures,” explained A. Emelyanov. “After all, after Nikolai Andreev passed away, this house until 2017 served as a communal apartment for representatives of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists.”

Reportedly, everything recovered from the cache was handed over to specialists. They will have to more accurately determine the age of the finds, and also figure out who is the author of the sculptures. Based on the results of the examinations, a decision will be made to restore the finds and display them at exhibitions.

The current “surprise” has “predecessors”. In the recent past, during the renovation of old buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, “cache” with contents of interest from the point of view of artistic and historical value were found several times.

For example, in the spring of 2010, a late 19th-century sculptural group, “The Runaway Slave,” by master sculptor Vladimir Beklemishev, was found walled up under one of the stairs in the Winter Palace.

There, in the Northern capital, two years later, in 2012, during the restoration of the former Naryshkin mansion, while repairing the ceilings, workers came across a secret room filled with silver items. Hidden there, apparently since the revolutionary years, were luxurious silver table services, jewelry, decorative items, orders and medals… In total, the weight of silver items amounted to more than 400 kilograms!

But when preparing for the reconstruction of the building of the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, also under the stairs in the service room, the workers came across a false wall, behind which someone for some reason had put things dating back to 1930-1940. – a crib, a pair of wooden Viennese chairs, a hockey stick, English textbooks…