"Moscow Tea Party" Automatic translate

The Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve presents the Moscow Tea Party exhibition. Through the history of the Russian samovar and tea ware, the exposition in the Palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich tells about the national cultural phenomenon - Russian tea drinking and its private manifestation - "Moscow-style tea drinking."

Today tea is the second most popular drink in the world after water. In Russia, almost everyone drinks it, but this was not always the case.

Tea appeared in Russia in the first half of the 17th century, under Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov. At first it was used only as a medicine, but soon they began to drink it for pleasure.

By the middle of the 17th century, up to ten varieties of tea could be bought in Moscow, and in 1679 an agreement was signed with China on its regular supply. In the early years, imports did not exceed 3,000 poods (48,000 kg.), But gradually the popularity of the drink grew, and at the end of the 18th century its share was more than 30% of all imports in the country. Up to 60% of imported tea went to Moscow.

In the 18th century, drinking tea in noble houses remained an expensive and fashionable hobby. Over tea, conversations were held on sophisticated topics, music sounded, and it was in such an atmosphere that the Russian romance was born.

But from the beginning of the 19th century, they had tea, mainly in taverns. Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848) wrote about this: “There are many taverns in Moscow, and they are always packed mostly with people who only drink tea in them. These are the people who drink fifteen samovars a day, the people who cannot live without tea, who drinks it five times at home and the same number of times in taverns. "

In the second half of the 19th century, when the Samara-Ufa and Yekaterinburg-Tyumen railways were built in Russia, tea was imported from India and Ceylon. All this drastically reduced its cost. During this time, teahouses became especially popular, opening at 5 am and selling tea at low prices. These establishments quickly won the love of peasants, cabbies, employees and officials.

The samovar was the center of any tea drinking. This household item brought festivity and disposed to a leisurely table conversation. The Urals became the homeland of the first Russian samovars: in the middle of the 18th century, production began at the Suksunsky plant, and in the second half of the 18th century, the first samovar factories were opened in Tula. In the years 1820-1830. factories appeared in other Russian provinces, including St. Petersburg.

In Moscow, the industrial production of samovars began to develop in the second half of the 18th century. They were made at the factories of Alexander Shmakov, Peter Silin, Konstantin Pets, Fedor Emme and Alexander Matisen. Moscow samovars were made of various shapes ("jar", "glass", "vase", "egg", "acorn", "dula") from copper and covered with silver. Ornamental motifs in the Russian or “Byzantine” style, in the style of “neoclassicism”, “neo-rococo” and other areas of historicism were popular in decoration.

You can learn about this and much more by visiting the Moscow Tea Party exhibition in the Great Exhibition Hall of the Palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich.

The items for the exposition were provided by the Kolomenskoye and Tsaritsyno museums and the Museum of Moscow. In the exhibition space, interior compositions of tea drinking in a noble house, a merchant’s feast and tea drinking in a tavern are recreated. The interiors contain brass Tula and copper Moscow samovars of various forms of the mid-19th - early 20th centuries. They are complemented by tea sets of 1840-1880, made at the factories of Orlov, Safronov, Gardner, Popov, Sipyagin, Rachkin, Kornilov, Kuznetsov; factories of Sabanin, Pchelin and Akunin.