🇷🇺 Russia
Moscow
Moscow (Moskva) is the largest city in Europe — a metropolis of 13 million people built around the medieval walled fortress of the Kremlin (11th century) on the Moscow River. Russia's political, cultural and economic capital for most of the past 700 years, Moscow was built, burned, rebuilt and transformed repeatedly: by Ivan the Terrible, by Peter the Great (who moved the capital to St. Petersburg), by Napoleon (who burned it in 1812), by Stalin (who demolished half the historic centre and replaced it with the seven Stalinist skyscrapers — the "Seven Sisters"), and by the post-Soviet oligarchy. The result is one of the most layered and contradictory cities in the world: Byzantine gold-domed churches beside Soviet-era monuments, the world's most ornate metro system, and a street food culture built on dumplings and blini.