A 1147 chronicle town became the world’s coldest megacity
Moscow, Russia’s capital on the Moskva River, holds more than thirteen million residents inside a federal city that is the planet’s northernmost and coldest megacity. First documented in 1147, it rose as capital of a grand principality that unified Russian lands and later the tsardom.
The favoured etymology links the river to a Proto-Indo-European root for wet, suggesting a river by a marsh. A Finno-Ugric alternative says the Merya and Muroma, pre-Slavic tribes of the area, called it Mustajoki, Black River. The reconstructed Old Russian form was Mosky, a rare Slavic noun type, and 12th-century records show case forms such as Moskovĭ and Moskve, from which modern Moskva was regularised. Epithets include the Third Rome, and in Soviet times it was one of 12 Hero Cities.
Hunter-gatherers of the Neolithic Lyalovo culture left the earliest relics, and around 950 two Slavic tribes, the Vyatichi and Krivichi, moved in. The 1147 chronicle names the place as a meeting point for Yuri Dolgorukiy and Sviatoslav Olgovich, when it was a small town on Rostov-Suzdal's western edge. The first Kremlin walls went up in the 1150s, and Mongol armies sacked the town in 1237–38 after destroying Ryazan.
Daniel, Alexander Nevsky's youngest son, received Moscow as hereditary land in 1263 and founded what became the Danilov Monastery. After his death in 1303 the principality nearly tripled to take in the whole Moskva basin. Peter the Great moved the capital to Saint Petersburg in 1712, but the Bolsheviks brought it back in 1918.
The city spans 2,511 square kilometres, with more than 21.5 million people in the metropolitan area, the largest in Europe, yet over 40 percent of its land is green. Four international airports, ten rail terminals and Europe's busiest metro serve it. It ties Hong Kong for the second-most billionaires, holds most of Europe's tallest skyscrapers in its business centre, hosted the 1980 Olympics and co-hosted the 2018 World Cup.
Source: Moscow
