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# On 11 April 1908, Good Friday, the most famous Moscow flood began, inundating a quarter of the city, an area of 16 square kilometres
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/11-aprelia-v-strastnuiu-piatnitsu-1908-goda-v-moskve-nachalos-samoe-izvestnoe-moskovskoe-navodnenie-zatopivshee-chetvert-goroda-ploshchad-16-kvadratnykh-kilometrov/
- Published: 2025-12-07T06:02:45.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:27:47.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Moscow, Society, Nature

A sharp thaw after the snowiest winter in 18 years filled the Moskva River and its tributaries, and in just twenty-four hours the water level rose by more than 7.5 metres. Rain was falling and a strong wind was blowing besides, so the water kept on rising, and later its level reached 9 metres. The worst flooding was in the right-bank districts of the city, Dorogomilovo and Zamoskvorechye.

The newspapers wrote that a day earlier the water had begun to rise alarmingly, and in various parts of the city they started to raise embankments of earth and manure, while ground-floor windows were boarded up and tarred. During the flood the city's embankments were entirely under water, as were the streets and lanes adjoining them. Some houses found themselves cut off on every side.

And although carts sank easily in the deep water, cab-stands soon appeared on the shores of the newly formed lakes, offering to ferry across the bewildered public. People went along the lanes by boat, but this was not safe: the current could carry them into the river, and the hapless passengers risked not only being swept out of the city by the swift streams or capsized, but also colliding with barrels, logs, firewood, fragments of fences and paving, haystacks and outbuildings hurtling chaotically over the water: in the afternoon a whole barge broke up at the Borodino Bridge. With its many boats carrying passengers going about their ordinary business, and even to church, the city resembled Venice.

On the embankment the Butikov factory caught fire, but there was no way to put it out: the firemen simply could not get there through the water. The Genner sugar works, flooded in Dorogomilovo, made the river water sweet for a full day, while Ushakov's chemical works, likewise flooded, dyed the water yellow, and with it all the houses along the Bersenevskaya Embankment.

The whole area around the Kremlin was flooded, as were the approaches to the Stone Bridge and the Ustyinsky Bridge, and along the Kremlin walls the water rose two and a half metres. The Krymsky Bridge became an island, with the houses around it flooded to the middle of their ground floors. The current was so strong that the small houses all over the affected district were in danger of being torn from their foundations. People escaping from them floated on gate leaves. The flood destroyed 25,000 buildings.

The water began to fall only on the morning of Holy Saturday, and then very slowly, so that on Sunday many streets still woke up flooded. In all, 100 kilometres of streets were under water. Restoring the city cost 20 million roubles, and the stricken and destitute Muscovites were helped with provisions, foodstuffs, supplies, clothing and money by people from all over Russia.

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