About the book: 2014 / Some cities have a distinct imprint of “royalty”; it’s as if they were destined from above to rule countries and peoples. These are, for example, Rome, Paris, Constantinople and Moscow. In this purpose lies a secret: some kind of special grace, which in the Middle Ages was found in people, namely in monarchs, and they tried to explain by the miraculous properties of “royal blood”. The main property of “royal blood” for a city is to create myths around itself. These myths are sometimes contemporary with the present, and sometimes they are “late” by several decades or even centuries, and then they describe the past of the city. Moscow has always produced mysterious images: a queen on the throne, the Third Rome and the Second Jerusalem, the capital of Russian merchants, the capital of world Bolshevism, and now, it seems, the image of the capital of world Orthodoxy is gradually being born. The book tells about Moscow reality - historical, cultural, architectural, everyday, as well as about vivid images that, in the minds of contemporaries and descendants, transformed this reality into something completely new.