What a nice city Samara was a hundred years ago! The main street, Dvorianskaia, was able to compare with an elegant belle. It was dressed in new houses was built in Art Nouveau styles by metropolitan architects, with wide sidewalks, luxurious shops, illuminated by electroliers, it made an impression of a street in European town. Sometimes the end of nineteenth and beginning of twentieth calls “Medici period” in a culture life of Russia: it was an unprecedented flourish of merchants’ philanthropy. Exactly merchants expanded Samara and could raise it to the status of the regional center.
Russian patriarchal provincial merchants who stoked lard just yesterday stretched to the Western level of culture because of their wildness and greed. They were making their own yacht-clubs, hippodromes, museums and theatres; were dressing impeccably, ordering outlandish motorcycles and cars from the capitals and foreign countries.
In nineteen hundred four Samara was surprised of a rattling carriage moved without horses. Golovkin was one of the first people in Samara who bought German car “Opel” which was delivered by train. The first accident happened at once. While going along Moskatelnaia street near the Distillery, the car startled horses in the yard. The loaded horses started running, the wagons were crashing, boxes with bottles were falling from them. The next day the owner of the factory asked to submit a bill for the damage to Golovkin, which was brought him by the politsmeyster.
Golovkin and other owners of cars often have to stop their cars and give way for horses. Hens didn’t run away from the wheels becoming victims of collisions. And Golovkin paid one rouble for each “victim”. People knew it soon and started throwing dead hens under wheels being in hope to get the compensation.
There was built a chapel in Russian style made of red bricks with white stone decorates and a little gilded head on the octahedral marquee on the seafront in eighteen eighty seven in honor of the three hundredth anniversary of Samara. It was the first work of a young and talent architect Scherbachev whose creations decorated Samara then. The chapel was destroyed by Soviet authorities and restored in nineteen ninety seven.
The history of the city is composed of the histories of the streets, houses and their inhabitants and, of course, events.
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