Contemporary Museum of Calligraphy

This small museum in Sokolniki Park takes visitors on a global journey of this little-publicised art and shows that it is still alive and well in the days of Times New Roman and Comic Sans. Words in themselves have long held an almost sacred place in cultures throughout the world, and there's something very mesmerising about watching calligraphy masters at work in the museum's video display. In this exhibition we see better-known examples of calligraphy from the bold brush strokes of Chinese characters to the ornate golden free-flowing threads of Arabic, as well as Old Church Slavonic icons and modern interpretations and more obscure scripts such as the curvy forms of Georgian and the neat rounded hills of Armenian letters. Commentaries from modern calligraphers accompany their works and give an insight into why the art of writing beautifully still holds such a fascination for them.