Gostiny Dvor, like much in Kaluga, bears a relation to space exploration: in 1961, citizens greeted Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first cosmonaut, on the square in front of this building. Gostiny Dvor is a quarter of 14 outlets that form a rectangle. It appeared in the XVIII century.
When the Russian classical writer Nikolai Gogol visited Kaluga, he liked to look in the bookshop located exactly in the Gostiny Dvor. Today, the Gostiny Dvor is still used as intended: there is a fair of Kaluga craftsmen here where you can buy woodwork, glassware and works of stone, ceramics and even gingerbreads.Near the Gostiny Dvor there is a monument of the communist era. A monument to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, one of the first in the country, was opened in the Lenin Park, founded in 1924, after the death of the leader. Precisely such a monument, its duplicate copy, was installed in St. Petersburg (Leningrad at the time) two years later. The Kaluga monument to Lenin was moved across the road to the building of the regional administration, towards the decline of the Soviet era. But the fountain in the form of a pentagonal star remained in the park.