* For most of its nearly 500-year history, Kimry was a palace village. But the village is unique in its own way — one of the capitals of shoemaking in Russia. To feel the scale of production, let's give just one figure: by the end of the 19th century, the annual output of shoe products in Kimry exceeded 2.5 million pairs! The Kimry peasant shoemakers got rich and tried to replicate the luxury, first of all, of the capital's residential mansions and suburban dachas, built in the dominant turn-of-the-century style in European Art Nouveau. Four unique monuments of pre—revolutionary Art Nouveau are the residential buildings of Potapenko, Luzhin, Serepiev and Rybkin.