Festival flower monument. Friendship Park at the river station is one of the most beautiful places in the capital. Trees planted in honor of friendship
Are you looking for a place for a pleasant walk and relaxing in nature on a weekend in the capital? Be sure to visit the Friendship Park at the River Station - this is a beautiful and well-maintained recreation area. Here everyone will find something to do and appreciate the cleanliness of the local air. Where is this park located and what is the history of its creation?
Trees planted in honor of friendship
For the 50-60s of the last century, it was a tradition to organize all kinds of festivals and meetings of activists of Soviet youth movements with their colleagues from other countries. Such events usually took place with meetings and celebrations. Often, delegations, together with the host country, participated in subbotniks and planting trees. The VI World Festival of Youth and Students (1957) did not become an exception to the rules, during which the Friendship Park was laid at the River Station. During all the previous five festivals in the cities where they took place, tree planting was carried out in local recreation areas. During V meeting Friendship Alley was planted in Warsaw. But the Moscow festival distinguished itself in a special way - by planting a whole park.
Location of the park and its boundaries
Description of the recreation area
Today, Friendship Park at the River Station has a regular layout. It has enough lawns and flower beds, trees are planted singly and in groups. There are several ponds in the recreation area, there are beautiful bridges. But there are no modern attractions and entertainment here. This is a place for a relaxing family holiday. Here you can walk, play sports, relax, sitting on benches or grass. If you want to ride the Rollercoaster or go to the Panic Room, choose another recreation area. Friendship Park in Moscow boasts modern children's and sports grounds, and there are many interesting monuments here.
Sights and interesting objects
There are many interesting monuments in the park. The central one is the "Festival Flower" - a sculptural composition consisting of figures of young people releasing doves. Near the main entrance you can see a monument to the Hungarian-Soviet friendship, this is a gift to the park from the inhabitants of Budapest (1976). The same monument is installed in Budapest itself. Friendship Park at the River Station is decorated with two sculptures by Vera Mukhina: "Bread" and "Fertility". There are other monuments here: "Children of the World", a memorial to "Warriors who fell in Afghanistan", a Nicaragua stele to Carlos Fonseca Amador - a fighter for national liberation. The most modern and popular attraction of the park is Alisa Selezneva Alley, opened in 2001 with the participation of the author of the work "Alice's Adventures" - Kir Bulychev and actress Natalia Guseva, who played the main role in the film "Guest from the Future". Favorite place children in the recreation area - circus tent "Rainbow". Many residents of the capital come here on weekends. Friendship Park (River Station) holds a variety of events - these are friendly sports tournaments, concerts and dance evenings, meetings of activists of youth movements. Fans of aeromodelling gather here regularly. There is a dog walking area in the park, sometimes you can watch demonstrative dog shows or animal shows here.
How to get to Friendship Park?
It is not easy to drive to the main entrance to the recreation area due to traffic jams. But even if you succeed, be prepared for the fact that the park does not have its own parking lot. Think in advance where you are ready to leave the car. The best option- drive in from Festivalnaya Street, here you can find a small parking lot, many motorists park right along the road. Alternative option- turn off the Leningradskoye highway onto Flotskaya and leave the car in one of the residential yards. What to do if there is no personal car, but you really want to visit the Friendship Park at the River Station? How to get here by public transport? The easiest option is to take the metro to the Rechnoy Vokzal station, one of its vestibules is located directly on the territory of the park. Also near the park there are many stops of land transport, a variety of routes go here.
Flowers have always been a special element in the traditions and culture of the peoples of the world - medicinal and poisonous, amazing in shape and unusual in color, rare and growing at every turn - since prehistoric times they have been used in cult rites and religious sacraments. Some types of flowers grow on almost all continents, but some representatives of the flora are so rare that they are considered the property of a particular area, becoming a symbol of the country and the whole nation.
Rare red flowers - symbols of the states of Australia
Large red flowers Waratah (Telopea speciosissima) is a large shrub or shrub of the Proteaceae family, a symbol of New South Wales in Australia. Telopea grows up to 4 m high and about 2 m wide, and its inflorescences reach about 10 cm in diameter and consist of approximately 250 individual flowers. It blooms in bright crimson color in autumn in the form of a large ball or cone in the undergrowth and in sunny glades.
The local aborigines have always considered Varatakh a totem and used it in ritual ceremonies, composing about beautiful flower legends. An ancient legend tells of a beautiful girl named Krubi, who is in love with a young warrior who dies in battle. Heartbroken, she dies, and at the place of her death red flowers of Varatah grow. Due to its unusual shape, in the 19th and 20th century, a rare flower became a popular motif of Australian Art Nouveau, and since 1956, an annual flower festival has been held in Sydney, dedicated to the amazing beauty of Telopea.
The Desert Pea - Swainsona Formosa or Sturt's Desert Pea - is the state flower of South Australia, famous for its blood-red buds with black, bulb-shaped centers. It is one of Australia's most beautiful wildflowers, found in its driest regions. The red flower got its name from the Latin "formosa", which means beautiful, and from the name of the English botanist who found it in 1699. The 9 cm Formosa buds grow on 15 cm vertical stems scattered along a creeping stem that can reach 2 m in length. In 1961, red desert polka dots were proclaimed the floral emblem of the state, already a widely used motif in the art of the Green Continent at that time, as well as a decorative element in the work of indigenous aborigines and part of their culture.
Unusually called Anigozanthos manglesii or Kangaroo Paw, which means kangaroo paw, was declared in 1960 the state emblem of Western Australia. This one of the rarest flowers in the world blooms in late August and is characterized by its long gray-green stems about 1.5 meters high. On the initially “bald” tips of the stems of the kangaroo paw, from spring to the end of summer, two-color inflorescences gradually appear, resembling spread fingers, in which green color miraculously flows into red.
The most beautiful flowers of the world - symbols of the countries and peoples of Africa
Little Zimbabwe managed to get as a symbol of the country a very beautiful and rare flower Gloriosa superba - a fiery lily or a tiger's claw, which was used in medicine in ancient times - both as a medicine and as a poison. This unusually beautiful plant is distributed over most of Africa and Asia and belongs to the category of climbers - sometimes it grows up to 2.5 m in height, and its bright red flowers with “ruffles” around the edges reach 8 cm. sand dunes of Africa, but it is known in China, India and other regions of Asia.
The blood lily is extremely poisonous - its flowers, stems, and especially the tuberous rhizome contain colchicine, a toxic alkaloid that can be fatal if an animal or person ingests the plant. In ancient times, a red flower, reminiscent of fire in its outlines, was considered magical in many cultures of the world - it was part of religious rituals and sacraments.
The royal protea (Protea cynaroides) or giant protea is the national symbol of South Africa; against the background of its 1600 relatives, it stands out in appearance with a considerable size of flowers, which sometimes reach 30 cm in diameter. Having a thick long root and large fleshy leaves, the protea is optimally adapted to difficult climatic conditions South Africa - dry summers and rainy cold winters. In addition, a large number of dormant processes of the protea root system make the flower so tenacious that it calmly survives numerous fires, reborn almost immediately from the ashes.
The name of the flower comes from the many-faced Greek god Proteus and fits perfectly with the plant, which is distinguished by a large variety of leaf shapes and colors. The shade of Protea flowers varies from vanilla white to intense crimson and red, but pink inflorescences are considered the most valuable. Stem unusual flower can reach a height of 30 cm to 2 m and produce 6 to 10 buds during the flowering season. Such large mostly miniature nectary birds pollinate - Cinnyris chalybeus, Nectarinia famosa, Promerops cafer. A protected and iconic place for the Republic of South Africa, the symbol of Cape Town - Table Mountain, is famous for its National Park, where the beautiful protea lives in all its biodiversity.
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In 1957, from July 28 to August 11, the World Festival of Youth and Students was held in Moscow, the sixth in a row. The traditional event and celebration of all five previous youth festivals was the planting of trees in the parks of the cities where the festivals were held, in memory of these unforgettable meetings. Individual trees were planted in Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and Berlin - symbolically from each continent of the world or a delegation. In Warsaw, at the V World Festival of Youth and Students, the Alley of Friendship was planted. And here in Moscow they decided to lay a whole park - Friendship Park!
This idea captivated us - Galina Ezhova, Anatoly Savin and me, Valentin Ivanov, young architects who only graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute in July 1956 and worked in the Department of the Chief Artist of the Soviet Preparatory Committee for the Festival ... it turned out that the place of the future park had not yet been determined. The drawing, which was shown to us as a possible option, was made on Poklonnaya Gora on Mozhaisk Highway ... There are two more sites in other parts of the city in mind. We agreed to go all together, with our main artist B.G. Knoblok, see Poklonnaya Gora, and sites in the area of the future Profsoyuzny Prospekt and on the Leningrad Highway, where there are old worked-out quarries of the Nikolsky brick factory opposite the park of the Khimki River Station.
After getting acquainted with the potential sites, everyone unanimously came to the conclusion that there is no better place for the future park than quarries filled with the purest water, separated by picturesque isthmuses and surrounded by a hilly relief formed by overburden during their development…
We agree that the emblem of the Moscow festival - the festival chamomile with five multi-colored petals, symbolizing the 5 continents of the world, must certainly be reflected in the layout of the park and in its various spatial forms. Therefore, along the rhombus formed by two alleys running from the main square, we place 5 round areas, united by a tie of narrow walking paths - again symbols of the five continents, whose representatives should take part in the celebration of laying the park during the days of the festival. We dream that subsequently, on each site, sculptural compositions should appear, in the nature of their artistic solution and content, consonant with each continent. Unfortunately, even today, after almost 50 years, this remains a dream, although more and more new sculptures and commemorative signs, unforeseen then by our project, constantly appear on the territory of the park ...
Only one team of landscapers from the Moszelenstroy trust of the then Moscow Landscaping Directorate, numbering ten people, headed by foreman Vitaly Ivanovich Shilov, worked at our construction site, and from the equipment there was only one old bulldozer that constantly broke down. Of course, the forces for cleaning the territory from debris, for simple planning work on arranging lawns and for preparing seats there was not enough for future commemorative landings. Therefore, A.N. Shelepin instructed the Moscow Komsomol to take part in the preparation of the territory for the future holiday. And now, for almost two months, every working day, at about sixteen hours, a string of buses brought six hundred to eight hundred Komsomol members to our construction site. Our task was to prepare the next front of work for them, with which we, architects and builders, coped quite successfully. The boys and girls worked for three hours with rakes and shovels, and then they went swimming in orderly rows in the ponds of the future park. And everyone was very pleased with the accomplished deeds ...
The park laying ceremony took place on August 1, 1957 in the afternoon and attracted almost 5 thousand delegates, festival guests and numerous residents of the surrounding areas, although we had previously expected no more than a thousand. For many of them, especially representatives of the southern continents, our firs and birches were exotic plants. They planted them with great pleasure in the places prepared by us. The Moscow pioneers gave them a solemn obligation to take care of the planted plants, and the participants of the action left their names and addresses in plastic bags in the form of tree leaves.
When Friendship Park was created, there was no Livoberezhny district and metro in these places. Construction began here only a few years after the opening of the park. Now there are many monuments here.
From the estate to the palace and park ensemble: an architectural and historical cheat sheetThe central one - "Festival Flower" - appeared in 1985. On it, bronze four-meter figures of a young man and a girl release doves into the sky. The sculpture symbolizes a happy youth and a peaceful future.
At the main entrance to the park there is a monument to the Hungarian-Soviet friendship by sculptors E.V. Vuchetich, Zh.K. Strobl. It was presented to Moscow by the inhabitants of Budapest in 1976. This is a paired monument - its twin brother is located in Budapest.
In 1957, the Nicaraguan revolutionary Carlos Fonseca Amador visited the festival of youth and students in Moscow. A memorial sign was erected in his honor with an inscription in Spanish: Carlos Fonseca Amador. Founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua. He planted a tree of friendship here during the VI World Youth Festival of Students in Moscow.
Also in the Friendship Park there is a sculpture "Children of the World", a monument to the writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore, a monument to the hero of the Kyrgyz heroic epic Manas the Magnanimous, a memorial plaque "To the Warriors who fell in Afghanistan", sculptures "Bread" and "Fertility", created according to sketches by Vera Mukhina after her death. In 1981, a copy of the Madrid monument to Cervantes by A. Sol came here, and a copy of the monument to Pushkin by O. Komov went to Madrid. Cervantes' sword turned out to be a weak point - in 2000 it was stolen. The monument was restored several times, but each time it ended with the loss of the sword. Therefore, we decided to leave it as is.
And the most favorite attraction of the Friendship Park guests is Alisa Selezneva Alley. It was opened by a group of enthusiasts on October 6, 2001. The ceremony was also attended by the author of the book "Alice's Adventures" Kir Bulychev and actress Natalya Guseva, who played the main role in the film "Guest from the Future".
In addition, there are many ponds and bridges in the Friendship Park, there is a rugby and baseball field, where there are always a lot of foreign guests. And on weekends, fans of aircraft modeling gather in the park and arrange competitions.
They say that...... admirers of Kir Bulychev's creativity annually harvest rowan berries and make a tincture called "Alisovka" from them.
Friendship Park in photographs of different years:
Can you tell something else about Friendship Park?The creation of the Friendship Park with an area of about 50 hectares was timed to coincide with the VI World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow. Until 1957, on the Leningrad Highway opposite the Northern River Station, there was a wasteland with the remains of rural buildings on the site of the village of Aksinino, with a wood warehouse and railway lines to the asphalt concrete and Nikolsky brick factories.
After the end of the Second World War, a world conference of youth for peace was held in London, at which it was decided to hold international festivals under the slogan "For Peace and Friendship!". The program included political seminars and discussions, concerts, sports competitions, and festivals opened with a colorful procession of participants. The Dove of Peace, painted by Pablo Picasso, became the symbol of the youth forum.
The main youth forum of the planet came to the capital of the USSR after Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Berlin, Warsaw, and in each of the cities that hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students, the delegates planted trees in parks and squares. Moscow has supported the festival tradition by greening the northwestern outskirts of the city.
Plan of Friendship Park. 1957: https://pastvu.com/p/13102
The project of the park was developed by a team of young architects, recent graduates of the Moscow Architectural Institute. For Valentin Ivanov, Galina Ezhova, Anatoly Savin, this was the first independent work done with the tactful participation of Vitaly Dolganov, who headed the design workshop for the landscaping of Moscow. In particular, according to the project of Dolganov, an observation deck was built on the Lenin Hills, and his merits were awarded the Order of Lenin. The professional advice of the master was useful to young people, who were given complete freedom of action.
The creators of the park also collaborated with the architect Karo Halabyan, who at that time was developing a detailed layout of the new streets, which in 1964 received the names Festivalnaya and Flotskaya. On December 31 of the same year, the Rechnoy Vokzal metro station, built according to a standard project, was opened for passengers on the territory of Friendship Park.
Friendship Park and Festival Street. 1965-1967: https://pastvu.com/p/22315
Well, in the spring of 1957, young architects punched through their project in the authorities. The architectural and planning solution differed from the neighboring park of the Northern River Station, located on a flat terrain.
Ivanov, Yezhova and Savin advocated the preservation of a picturesque landscape with hills and reservoirs. It was not until April that the executive committee of the Moscow City Council approved the plan, and a team of landscapers from the Moszelenstroy trust set about practical work with the support of hundreds of Komsomol members with shovels and rakes brought to the place by buses.
Paths and squares were laid out in Friendship Park, benches were installed, bridges were thrown across the canals, 500 birches, lindens, maples, larches, chestnuts and coniferous trees from nurseries were planted. Five fifty-year-old lindens symbolized five continents, and in the center stood an eighty-year-old oak tree from the Khimki forest park. The main decoration of the park was a flower bed - the emblem of the World Festival of Youth and Students - a chamomile with five multi-colored petals.
Let me remind you that at that time the vicinity of the River Station was a village mixed with an industrial zone, and in order to retouch the unsightly reality, the organizers painted blank fences with images of young people different peoples walking towards the park with seedlings, watering cans and shovels in their hands. It was probably the first domestic graffiti, and legal.
The opening ceremony of the park took place on August 1, 1957 with a huge gathering of people. About a thousand trees were reserved for planting, but there were five times more people wishing to participate in landscaping. The delegates left notes with their names on the seedlings and, after completing the honorary mission, were treated to wine and fruits, which were distributed by young men and women in national costumes peoples of the republics of the USSR. But the performance of amateur performances did not take place due to heavy rain, which forced the delegates of the festival to scatter in their buses.
Planting trees in the park. August 1, 1957: https://pastvu.com/p/13104
Soviet youth, just freed from the Stalin cap, for the first time got the opportunity to freely exchange opinions with guests from capitalist countries, hence the fashion for jeans, stylish hairstyles, rock and roll, and individual Komsomol members could not resist even more informal communication with the envoys of others continents, which led to the emergence of the phraseological unit "children of the festival".
Another Moscow festival was held in 1985 at a high ideological level and did not become such an enchanting event. By the beginning of this festival, the landscape composition "Festival Flower" was opened in Friendship Park. The tradition of holding youth forums has been preserved to this day, the XIX World Festival of Youth and Students is planned to be held in September-October 2017 in Sochi.
Well, all the planted trees have taken root and Friendship Park is still a favorite place for walking local residents. In 1957, the Moscow pioneers solemnly promised to take care of the plantings, but with the abolition of the pioneer organization, this responsibility was shifted to public utilities.
The flowerbed-chamomile was destroyed in 1977, in its place a monument of Hungarian-Soviet friendship was erected on the idea of the Soviet sculptor Vuchetich and the Hungarian Storbl (sculptor B. Buza, architects I. Zilakhi, I. Fedorov). Since then, a lot of chaotically installed sculptures and memorial signs have appeared on the territory of the Friendship Park, which are not directly related to the youth festival movement.
The sculptural compositions "Bread" and "Fertility" were created according to sketches by Vera Mukhina
Monument "Friendship" - the central part of the composition "Festival Flower"
Memorial sign to the Nicaraguan revolutionary Carlos Fonseca Amador, who died in 1976
Danish gratitude to the feat of the Soviet Union (1986)
Commemorative plate of the monument to the soldiers who died in Afghanistan
Monument to the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1990)
Monument to the Spanish writer Cervantes (1981, copy of the 1835 sculpture by Antonio Sol). Vandals regularly take away the sword from Cervantes.
Monument to the Kyrgyz epic hero Manas the Magnanimous - a bronze figure of a hero (2012)
sculptural composition
peace tree
Alley of Alisa Selezneva, the heroine of the television film "Guest from the Future" (2001)
The six Festival Ponds are connected by canals with footbridges across them. After the festival, this part of the park remained wild and only by 1980 acquired its present form - with asphalt paths and concreted banks. The reason for the improvement was the holding of the XXII Olympic Games in Moscow, in which the Dynamo Sports Palace was involved on Lavochkin Street, adjacent to the park.
Quarries filled with water. 1957-1958: https://pastvu.com/p/13101
Improvement of the ponds is planned for 2016, for which the surrounding area is fenced off, passages through the footbridges are blocked. The list of planned works includes cleaning of silt and deepening of ponds, reconstruction of the spillway, installation of a feeding water supply system, repair of the coastline, arrangement of the adjacent territory.
Some quarries of the Nikolsky brick factory were flooded with water, while others were used as playground for rugby and baseball. The park hosted aircraft modeling competitions and testing of hunting dogs. Once upon a time, the NKZ brick factory occupied a vast area along the Leningradskoye Highway and Konakovskiy Proyezd and worked on its own raw materials, extracting clay from quarries, which later became ponds. The excavation of clay was carried out all year round by dredging machines that moved along rails along the edge of the quarry. In the early 1980s, production began to be curtailed, building up the factory territory with housing, and legally the NKZ ceased to exist in 1998.
In the background is the Nikolsky brick factory. 1938