Mozhaysk is the town on the road to Borodino, and Borodino is the reason most people know it. On 7 September 1812, about a dozen kilometers west of here, Napoleon's Grande Armée fought Kutuzov's Russian army in the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars, with tens of thousands killed or wounded in a few hours. The battlefield is now a vast open-air museum, with monuments, restored earthworks like the Raevsky Battery, and a landscape of wide fields and birch groves that is moving in its quiet.
Mozhaysk itself is an old town, first recorded in the twelfth century, with a hilltop kremlin of earthen ramparts and a white-stone cathedral. A famous medieval statue of St Nicholas of Mozhaysk, a wooden figure holding a sword in one hand and a city in the other, is the town's emblem and appears on its coat of arms. The Luzhetsky Monastery, founded in the fifteenth century, sits on the riverbank below. After the battle, the town was crowded with wounded, and the churches were turned into hospitals.
Near the battlefield, the Spaso-Borodinsky Convent was founded by Margarita Tuchkova, a general's widow who lost her husband at Borodino and built a church to his memory, a poignant and well-kept place. The road from Mozhaysk to Borodino follows the old Smolensk highway, the same route Napoleon took toward Moscow, and the open, rolling landscape lets you picture the armies. Riding is straightforward, on mostly decent surfaces, with gentle bends past fields and villages.
Mozhaysk has fuel, a market, shops and cafes, with the highway to Moscow a fast run of about a hundred kilometers. The reservoir to the north, a large, quiet lake, offers fishing and picnicking in summer. The best months are May to September, with early autumn the most comfortable, and the anniversary of the battle in early September draws reenactors in period uniform to the field. Winters are long and snowy, and spring brings mud, so avoid the unpaved side roads then. The M1 highway is busy, so leave early on weekends to avoid the dacha traffic.