Former building of religious school housing
The building of the former Religious school housing
The building, located at the southwestern corner of the square, is a two-storey house on a high basement. Today basement windows are not seen; they were liquidated during current reconstruction. But once they were many windows, and the basement was actively used, not as a service rooms, but we’ll come back to this issue later. Long exterior wall of the building faces the Karl Marx street, and the short – the International street. We prefer to use the past tense in our story about this building, because it is still under reconstruction and its further functionality is not fully elucidated. The main entrance of the building opens directly into the Square, although at the time of construction, the Square did not exist. It is known that for the past 60 years, this entrance was not in use. Above the entrance there was the second floor balcony with forged fenced bars. All the windows of the building are rectangular, and the floors are separated by the inter-floor overlapping. The facade of the building has been allocated by the rusticated pilasters. The whole building, though it was in line with the official style of state-owned institutions, had no special magnificence and beauty.
Date of construction is not known. From the works of the famous Tambov ethnographer P.Chermenskii, we can conclude that it already existed in 1877, and then it housed the Turkish prisoners of war. Therefore, it is the oldest building facing the Lenin Square. Presumably, the events that took place in M.U. Lermontov's poem "Tambov Treasurer" are linked with this building. The fact is that in the first third of the 19th century this place was occupied by the house of the Tambov Treasurer.
Opposite this building (number 3 on the map diagram) in a long wooden house located hotel "Moscow", where Lancers officers were lodged. Such an assumption was made by the chairman of a scientific archive committee A.N.Nortsov at the beginning of the 20th century. However, he also indicated another estimated location of these urban facilities, so there is no clear opinion about the location of the hotel "Moscow" and the house of the treasurer. Archival documents confirm that at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the building to the south of the Utkinskaia church was a "Religious school housing" - the place of residence for the students of Tambov diocesan schools.
