Terem Palace

Hidden within the Moscow Kremlin, this seventeenth-century royal residence is one of the finest surviving examples of old Muscovite palace architecture, its upper storeys stepping back beneath a golden checkerboard roof. The small, intimate chambers are covered in dense painted ornament, tiled stoves and carved stone window frames, evoking the enclosed world of the tsars before Peter the Great's westernising reforms. A famous red porch marks the ceremonial approach.