There are certain words that evoke a smell, conjuring up a distinct perfume with just a few syllables. City Day is two of those words for me although it is not the most beautiful conjunction in the world.

Then again neither is the smell.

I once lived off Tverskaya in a house that had a spacious courtyard which would see a steady trickle of men celebrating City Day who were drawn like a teenager to a can of gin and tonic to relieve themselves of a bladder full of Baltika's finest.

Now, that is not really the kind of thing that sends me into a fury.

Perhaps it will send me looking for a hosepipe to spray the offenders or to my camera so that I can to send pics to moscowwee.tumblr blog but City Day is more than watching the grey dusty road turn dark and wet on an autumn evening.

It is a different City Day mania that grates. Moscow will be 861 this year if we accept the date that has been pinned down rather insistently as the birth of Moscow. The city's founder will set up stages all over the city for concerts and events, the streets will be closed off, the clouds seeded and the mayor will probably buy a new bullet proof cap especially for the occasion.

As usual, there will be a long list of public buildings, new schools, hospitals and much vaunted reconstructions that will have been completed in time for City Day. This year's big one is the pulling down of the dark curtains up on Okhotny Ryad to show off the shiny new old hotel Moskva.

The hotel Moskva was a huge Stalinist structure which was one of the last preserves of the breed of hotel Sovieticus in the centre of the city. It's image adorned the Stolichnaya vodka bottle label and its two facades were said to be have been built completely differently after Stalin scrawled his name across the designs of both instead of just one.

There was a huge outcry when the order came to knock the building down on the grounds that it was unsafe but there are a lot of crying in Moscow. It still went down.

My favourite story about the hotel is the way it then disappeared. Slowly. Workers told Bolshoi Gorod magazine how their equipment kept on breaking on the hotel as they tried to knock it down and as the demolition period stretched on far longer than expected. They apparently built things very soundly in those days.

Now, almost four years later, the new Moskva, which is designed to look exactly the same as the old Moskva, will appear again on City Day.

The city has a mania to unveil something on these sainted days even if taking a few months even a few more years might have been a better idea. I'm not even sure that that many people actually take notice of the city's birthday presents.

Three years ago, the Manezh, the neoclassical building that squats outside the Kremlin, was unveiled as new again less than six months after it was gutted in a fire. A real restoration would have taken years.

Last year, the city unveiled the new improved Tsaritsyno, a reconstruction which has done a skilled job in destroying all of its charm. It is as if the city of Rome decided to finish the Coliseum and add a retractable roof as well.

This year, the Moskva will be the city's birthday cake but to construct an unwieldy metaphor it is good to remember that it is the same one they took away from the city just a few years ago.

And another thing, City Day goes on for the whole weekend so the title is misleading too. But that is just nitpicking.

Kevin O'Flynn, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow

September 5, 2008

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