Walking to See

Walking to See is my encounter with the city of Moscow, but it is not just meant to be a travel report; more than telling what I saw in Moscow, it aims to remind us of the importance of how we see and why this seeing is not a mere tourist experience, but a cultural and historical exploration. The text was born from two trips to the Russian capital: one in a bright and warm summer, and the other in a grey and cold autumn. What connects these two times is not just the passage of seasons, but a movement in our understanding of the relationship between form and meaning, place and memory, and history with the lived human body. The text encounters the Iranian subject in Red Square, in front of the colorful domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, or under the shadow of the tall Kremlin walls, engaging with our own Iran, with anonymous architecture that for years has not only failed to create memories but sometimes even erases them. The text questions: why has Moscow been able to shape such a powerful architectural memory for its people and the world? Why does each of its buildings have a story, while we remain unaware of even our own incomplete stories? At first glance, the text is travel notes, but later it becomes an essay on time, memory, and identity. Here, I speak of seeing buildings not as lifeless masses but as living entities that contain compressed historical awareness. Buildings are signs for us; signs of ways of being in the world, modes of narrating power, cultural meanings embedded in bricks and domes, and sometimes hidden from us.