Phil Hawley Photography

Moscow – Autumn in Sokolniki Park

Sokolniki Park is in the North East of Moscow and gets its name from the area of the city that the Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich’s Falconers used to live as Sokol means Falcon in Russian and he was a keen hunter.

The Park is a short walk from the Sokolniki metro down a tree lined pedestrian street and from the front of the park there is a circular road are a a number of main wide paths from here, forming a wedge shape.

When we got into the park the firs thing we saw apart from the huge ferris wheel in the background was a small bandstand and in front of this lots of elderly couples dancing, some comically slow, but the odd couple maniacally fast. We weren’t sure whether to find it sweet or funny, but certainly I was getting subtle warning glances from the spectators as they saw my camera so I just took one shot from a distance then decided it was safer not to take any more.

Walking through the park, you find the typical Beer and Shashlyk stalls/cafes along with an old fairground which we decided to circle around. We were glad we did really as living in the city the only wildlife we have seen since being here is the ubiquitous stray dogs, so the tiny squirrel was a nice surprise.

We began to discover that the map we had of the park just showed the main wide paths, we soon discovered a huge number of small paths criss-crossing these paths with large clearings in random places, they were mostly laid out for Peter the Great. The park is massive, it looks substantially smaller on the map anyway, we didn’t cross the Rostokinskiy Pr road which forms the far boundary of the park before you cross into the Elk Island (Losinyy Ostrov) National Park, we are saving that for another time.

The park looked beautiful on this Autumn Sunday, despite coming across a few empty cans of the dreaded Jaguar drink!  Click through the photos and see what you think, and feel free to comment or make suggestions. You can see more of my work on the site or on my Flickr Page.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 6:54 pm and is filed under All, Life, Photography and tagged with Autumn, Moscow, Park, Photography, Photos, Russia, Russian Federation, Sokolniki, Squirrel, Walk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.