Okhotny Ryad, Metro station in central Moscow, Russia
Okhotny Ryad is a metro station in central Moscow, situated beneath the city's main ring road close to the Kremlin and Manezhnaya Square. It has two underground entrance halls, each linked to the platform by escalators, and sits at one of the busiest interchange points on the Moscow Metro network.
The station opened on May 15, 1935, as one of the stops on the first Moscow Metro line ever to run. Over the following decades it was renamed more than once before returning to its original name in 1990.
The station is lined with columns of Italian silver marble, a material chosen to give the underground space a formal, almost ceremonial feel. Looking up at the ceiling and along the platform walls, you can see how much care went into shaping the interior during that early period of the Moscow Metro.
The eastern entrance connects through a building on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street to Teatralnaya station, while the western entrance leads to an underground shopping area. Both exits put you within walking distance of the Kremlin and the main central landmarks, so this is a good starting point for exploring the city center on foot.
During construction, engineers used a German method in which the tunnel walls were built above ground and then lowered into place. This approach protected the foundations of nearby buildings from the kind of damage that conventional excavation would have caused.
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