The design came from an architect recorded as M. Campinioni, and it was unusually ambitious for a provincial port. Two identical single-story buildings swept in concave arcs around Alexandrovskaya Square, today's Red Square, split by the street that now bears Chekhov's name. The continuous colonnade, the unbroken run of stairs, the massive entablature crowning it all - every element was chosen to make the separate shops read as one grand, unified whole. Contemporaries noticed the effect immediately: the place looked less like a bazaar than like an antique sanctuary transplanted to the shores of the Sea of Azov. Behind that dignified face, merchants of nineteenth-century Taganrog - a cosmopolitan trading city of Greeks, Italians, and Russians - sold their wares in the shade of the columns.

From 1874 to 1876, one of those stalls, near the corner by Soborniy Pereulok, was rented by Pavel Chekhov, and here his son Anton was pressed into service behind the counter. Pavel was a devout, exacting father who ran a grocery and expected his boys to mind it, and the young Anton loathed the long, cold hours of shopkeeping - the drudgery, the customers, the smell of the goods. That misery was not wasted. The writer he became drew directly on these years, mining the merchant world of his childhood for the shopkeepers and small-town strivers who fill his stories. Chekhov's uncle Ivan Loboda also kept a shop in the rows. For the family, this arcade was a livelihood; for literature, it was a workshop of observation.

Time did not treat the temple gently. Many stalls stood empty, so trade concentrated in the right-hand gallery while the rest was converted to lodging. In 1911 a two-story leather-goods shop broke the integrity of the colonnade. After the revolution, in 1921, a sculptural group symbolizing the union of workers and peasants - the work of a sculptor named Navratil, from Czechoslovakia - was mounted directly above the former Chekhov stall, an emblem of the new age planted atop the relic of the old; it was removed during repairs in 1966. Then came the Second World War, when a bomb struck the structure and many of its graceful arches were bricked shut. The surviving quarters, remarkably, remained in use through it all.

As the arcade weathered, the city increasingly bent it toward memory. In 1935, marking the 75th anniversary of Chekhov's birth, the grounds were reshaped into a public square. In 1960, for the centenary, a monument to Chekhov was unveiled right on Red Square, facing Chekhov Street and the historic downtown - the writer set in bronze, gazing over the streets he had walked as a reluctant shop boy. Restoration of part of the old Trade Rows was completed in 2007. What began as a temple to commerce has become, fittingly, a shrine to the boy who hated the shop and turned that feeling into art that outlived every merchant who ever traded here.