26. More expensive than a Stone bridge.
In Moscow, when they wanted to characterize the extraordinary high cost of something, they said: "More expensive than a Stone bridge." It was decided to build a Stone bridge across the Moskva River in 1648 under Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich. By royal order, specialist Anze Yagan Christler was discharged from Strasbourg. He made an estimate and made a wooden model of the future bridge, however, due to the death of Mikhail Fedorovich, construction was not started then. We returned to this thought forty years later, when two young brothers, Tsar Ivan and Peter, sat on the throne, and their elder sister, Princess Sophia, was the de facto ruler of the state. The bridge was built for five years – from 1687 to 1693. It was a grandiose construction, the like of which had never been seen in Moscow. Rumors were passed from mouth to mouth about the huge sums allocated to him by the royal treasury.
Tsarevna Sofia entrusted her favorite Prince Vasily Vasilyevich Golitsyn with overseeing the construction. V.V. Golitsyn was an educated and active man, but at the same time he was extremely greedy and did not disdain embezzlement. A significant part of the funds intended for construction settled in his pockets, which further increased costs. That's when the expression "More expensive than a Stone bridge" appeared. The Stone Bridge has become one of Moscow's landmarks, along with the bell tower of Ivan the Great, the Tsar Bell and the Tsar Cannon. In 1859, the old stone bridge was replaced by a new metal one, and in 1839 by a reinforced concrete one, but Muscovites still call it Stone.