Scratch a Moscow Street, Find a Tatar

“Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar”—a line variously pinned on Napoleon and on Joseph de Maistre, and repeated ever since by people who wished to sound both worldly and slightly alarmed. As a theory of national character it is lazy. As a theory of Moscow street names, however, it turns out to be embarrassingly accurate.

Russians themselves like to cast St Petersburg as the imported novelty and Moscow as the ancient, the native, the unimpeachably Slavic. Western visitors, meanwhile, have been calling Moscow “Asiatic” since roughly the sixteenth century, usually after a bad dinner. Both parties, it turns out, are right—though not in the way either of them meant. So let us take a walk. Comfortable shoes are advised; a dictionary, essential.

First stop: a trivet without a pot

We begin at Taganka, home of the Taganka Theatre, the boldest stage of the late Soviet years and the place where Moscow went to hear things it was not supposed to hear. Its name, however, is resolutely domestic. Tagan is the Turkic taγan, an iron trivet on which one sets a cauldron over the fire—a word still in everyday use in Kazakh and Tatar. In the seventeenth century the smiths of the Tagannaya quarter, across the Yauza river, hammered out these trivets by the hundred, an article without which no campaign could be fought or supper cooked. The capital’s most celebrated avant-garde theatre is thus, strictly speaking, the Theatre on the Trivet.

The cauldron, happily, is not far off. It is called Kazansky Station, after the city of Kazan, and qazan is Turkic for “cauldron.” In Türkiye the kazan still bubbles in every kitchen, and a milk pudding with a deliberately scorched bottom goes by the name of kazandibi—“the bottom of the cauldron.” Why a city should be named after a pot remains disputed: some point to the hollow in which Kazan sits, others to a legend about a cauldron dropped into the river. Either way, the set is complete. Trivet to cauldron is two stops on the Circle line, which presumably puts the pilaf somewhere around Kursky Station.

Second stop: mud, a horde, and the interpreters

Down to the river and across into Zamoskvorechye. Balchug, whose windows now command the most expensive views of the Kremlin in town, is the Turkic balčïq, “clay, mud.” Modern Turkish balçık means precisely the same thing, and on a wet day in Anatolia one may take some home on one’s boots free of charge. The name was perfectly honest: this low bank flooded every spring, and walking here was a pleasure for the very few. Today it hosts a five-star hotel which, translated with due candour, is Kempinski’s Mud. One does not like to say “ironic,” but there it is.

A little to the south runs Ordynka—the road to the Horde. And here the English reader may lean forward, because horde is the very same word: Turkic orda, “the khan’s camp, his headquarters,” which reached English by way of Polish in the sixteenth century, losing its dignity and acquiring an h en route. In Turkish it survives as ordu, “army,” and the Black Sea city of Ordu bears the same name as the Moscow street. Ordynka was where the people who travelled to the Horde and back made their homes: tribute collectors, merchants, Tatars in Russian service.

Next door are the Tolmachyovsky lanes. A tolmach is an interpreter, from Turkic tilmač; the interpreters of the Ambassadorial Office lived here. The word wandered west as well as north, and a German still calls an interpreter a Dolmetscher; Turkish keeps dilmaç, bookish but alive, and much favoured by translation agencies in need of a name with gravitas. The Tretyakov Gallery, as it happens, stands just around the corner. Russian art, in other words, took up residence next to the men who translated from the Khan’s.

The quarter ends, with no metaphor whatsoever, on Tatar Street.

Third stop: the Arbat, or it’s complicated

Now the Arbat—the most Muscovite street in Moscow, and the one with the murkiest past. It first appears in a chronicle of 1493, on the occasion of a fire, as befits anything of note in this city. The favourite explanation derives it from Arabic rabaḍ, “suburb, the quarter outside the walls,” brought to Moscow by Turkic intermediaries. Readers with some Spanish will hear a cousin here: arrabal, “outskirts,” comes from exactly the same Arabic word, by the western route. A tidy theory. But there is also Turkic arba, “cart”—the word that in Turkish became araba, “car”—and a perfectly Russian gorbat, “humpbacked,” for a hilly spot.

So the Arbat is an Arab suburb, or a cart, or a hump. The honest answer is that nobody knows, which is perhaps the most Arbat thing one could say about it.

Interval: East or impostor?

From the Old Arbat it is a short step to the New, where, inside the Korean-built Lotte Plaza, one finds a restaurant called Chaikhona No. 1. No better place to sit down could be devised. Chaikhona, “teahouse,” is Chinese cha, “tea,” which travelled west through Turkic mouths (and which English borrowed separately as chai), plus Persian khāna, “house”; Turkish says çayhane. A Persian house serving Chinese tea in a Korean shopping centre on a street with a possibly Arabic name, in a city with a Turkic trivet in its theatre and a cauldron at its railway station. The chain, moreover, carries the name of its founder, the restaurateur Timur Lansky, at which point no etymologist can keep a straight face: in Persian, the conqueror was Timur-i Lang, “Timur the Lame”—the very phrase which Europe compressed into Tamerlane and Marlowe into Tamburlaine. We shall meet the lame Timur again before the walk is over.

Order a pot of tea and make yourself comfortable. Below are a few Moscow names: some sound innocently Russian, others suspiciously Eastern. Can you tell which is which? Click the plus to see the answer.

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The moral of the game is simple. If a name sounds Eastern, check. If it sounds Russian, check twice.

Climax: the Tatar nicknames of Russian classics

Now for the real surprise. Moscow is full of streets named after men whom it is hard to suspect of anything but Russianness. Nikolay Karamzin, author of the first great history of the Russian state. Sergey Aksakov, whose Scarlet Flower is the Russian Beauty and the Beast. And Mikhail Kutuzov, the one-eyed field marshal who outwaited Napoleon and fell asleep at councils of war in War and Peace.

The Karamzins traced their descent from a Tatar named Kara-Murza, “the black mirza.” The first half is Turkic qara, “black” (Turkish kara, as in Karadeniz, the Black Sea); the second is Persian amīrzāda, “son of an emir,” inside which sits the Arabic amīr. Russia’s national historian thus carried three Eastern languages in his surname, which is more than most national historians can claim.

The Aksakovs descend from one Ivan Velyaminov, nicknamed Oksak: Turkic aqsaq, “lame.” Turkish aksak is alive and limping, and in music aksak denotes those “lame,” lopsided rhythms such as 9/8. The Russians of old called Tamerlane himself Aksak-Temir, the Lame Timur. Russia’s gentlest teller of fairy tales was, it seems, a namesake of Central Asia’s most terrible conqueror.

As for Kutuzov, the name comes from an ancestor nicknamed Kutuz, which the Turkologist Nikolai Baskakov derives from Turkic qutuz, “rabid, furious.” Recognise it? It is Turkish kuduz, “rabies,” the thing against which one vaccinates dogs. If Baskakov is right, the victor over Napoleon bore the surname “Rabid.” It was also, incidentally, the name of the Mamluk sultan Qutuz, who halted the Mongols at Ain Jalut in 1260. A furious Qutuz against the Mongols, a furious Kutuzov against Napoleon: the name, one feels, carries obligations. Kutuzov, for that matter, knew his East at first hand—he spent a year as Russia’s ambassador in Constantinople, a story told here.

Finale: the East that arrived by rail

The last layer is the latest and the most innocent. Soviet Moscow liked to name its streets after the cities of the Union, and took in whole dictionaries in the process.

Tashkentskaya Street is the street of the “stone city,” Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent: Turkic taš, “stone,” plus Sogdian kanθ, “city”—a bilingual monument to the meeting of Turks and Iranians. Both words are alive in Turkish, taş and kent, and both are everywhere on the map. Who has not heard of Beşiktaş, the Istanbul football club named after its district? The district’s name is variously explained, but the best-loved legend speaks of a Byzantine church that kept a stone from the manger at Bethlehem—hence beşik taş, “cradle stone.” Your humble servant, meanwhile, lives in a neighbourhood called Atakent, “Ata’s city,” in honour of a gentleman whose surname every reader in Türkiye will supply without assistance.

Astrakhansky Lane takes its name from Astrakhan, once Hajji Tarkhan. A hajji is one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca (Turkish hacı); a tarkhan, among the Turks and Mongols, was a man exempted from taxes for services to the khan—a sort of fiscal aristocrat. Muscovite princes borrowed the institution along with the word and issued “tarkhan charters” to free favoured monasteries from duties. Astrakhan, then, is in essence “the pilgrim who pays no tax”: a title anybody would covet.

And Tyumenskaya Street is named after Tyumen, from tümen, the Horde’s army of ten thousand; in the Turkish army a tümen is still a division. Persian made the same word into the toman, a coin once worth ten thousand dinars, and Iranians still count their money in tomans to this day.

Moscow has no idea how much Turkic, Arabic, and Persian is in its address book.

In lieu of a moral

The East in Moscow is not an exotic fringe but the foundations: the clay under Balchug, the trivet at Taganka, the Mongol post on Tverskaya-Yamskaya, the black mirza in the name of a historian. Russian has been soaking up Turkic words for centuries—we have already met one of them, the humble pay—and its place names behave no differently from its everyday speech.

So next time you pass through Taganka, try to catch the smell of a campfire. The cauldron, should you need it, is at Kazansky.