The Great Palace of Tsarskoye Selo (the Catherine Palace)

The Chinese Village

 From the Krestovy Bridge it is possible to walk along an alley of the New Garden in the Alexander Park to the Chinese Village that was constructed in the 1780s by the architects Charles Cameron and Ilya Neyelov (many researchers incline to the opinion that the idea and the original project belonged most probably to Antonio Rinaldi).

The compositional centre of the ensemble was supposed to be an octagonal observatory pavilion, the design for which was borrowed down to the smallest decorative details of the façade from an engraved view of a Chinese pagoda that was included in an album published in Amsterdam in 1669. An octagonal square and narrow street leading up to the “observatory” were to be lined by eighteen little houses in the “Chinese” style encircled by galleries. A small lane led from the Large Caprice to the square, where its entrance was to be marked by a “Chinese” gate. A further addition to the ensemble was a planned eight-tiered pagoda-tower that was allotted the role of a belvedere. For its construction a model of the famous pagoda in the royal gardens at Kew was ordered through the Russian ambassador in London. Its creator, Sir William Chambers, was the only eighteenth-century European architect to have visited China.

Construction of the Chinese Village began ten years after the project was drawn up. Of the eighteen single-storey houses, only ten were actually built. The observatory was not given the planned octagonal two-tier lantern with a Chinese roof; the galleries, entrance gates and pagoda never left the drawing-board. The role of belvedere was assumed by the Large Caprice, the pavilion at the top of which provided a vantage point for viewing the Tsarskoye Selo parks.

Originally the walls of the houses were faced with glazed ceramic tiles produced at the Conradi factory in Krasnoye Selo, but the tiles cracked with the first frosts and in 1780 Cameron gave orders for the buildings to be plastered and painted with oriental ornamental motifs. The most attractive feature of the houses became their curving roofs, painted in checkerboard and fish-scale patterns and adorned with figures of fantastic dragons. This smart decoration did not survive intact for long and was partially lost during the reconstruction carried out in the 1820s under the supervision of the architect Vasily Stasov.

On the death of Catherine II work on the Chinese Village was abandoned altogether. In 1798 her son, Paul I, gave orders for the houses to be dismantled to provide material for the Mikhailovsky Castle in St Petersburg. Fortunately that order was not carried out.

In the nineteenth century the Chinese Village was used as guest accommodation. Each house was furnished and provided with a small garden for relaxation. The furnishings comprised a bed, table, chest of drawers for linen and clothing, a properly equipped writing desk, and also a samovar, tea and coffee sets. The outstanding Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin lived in the village fairly often from spring until late autumn and from 1822 to 1825 worked here on his multivolume History of the Russian State that remained unfinished at his death on 22 May 1826.

Today the Chinese Village has been completely restored. Its houses are used as guest and living accommodation.

The Landscape Park

Back in the time of the first mistress of Tsarskoye Selo, an area of natural forest situated behind the “masonry chambers” of Catherine I was enclosed and turned into a game preserve in which wild animals were kept for the imperial hunt.

In the middle of the eighteenth century a brick wall was constructed around this Menagerie with bastions at the corners, in two of which amusement pavilions or Lusthäuser were created. In the centre of the Menagerie Savva Chevakinsky erected the Monbijou (“my jewel”) hunting pavilion that was soon reconstructed and decorated to plans by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli. Between the palace and the Menagerie the regular New Garden was laid out, divided by a cross-shaped arrangement of alleys and enclosed by the Krestovy Canal.

In the 1790s at the time of Catherine II to the north-east of the New Garden work began on the creation of a park to adjoin the Alexander Palace construction that was then under construction. The garden in the landscape style with three ponds and artificial hills was created by Joseph Bush; in the 1810s the work was continued by Piotr Neyelov and Charles Manners. In 1817 responsibility passed to Adam Menelaws who was entrusted with the creation of an extensive new park in place of the Menagerie. Menelaws was assisted in this by the master gardener Fiodor Liamin.

Between 1819 and 1826 the brick walls were demolished; new areas were incorporated on the south-west and north-east, where ponds were created and trees planted. The natural forest in what had been the Menagerie was turned into a park with an extensive network of paths originally created by Bush.

In a brief period of time Menelaws constructed a whole complex of Neo-Gothic buildings for Nicholas I in the new park: the White Tower, Chapelle, Arsenal, Lama Pavilion and Pensioners’ Stable.

Finally, in the middle of the nineteenth century the Babolovsky Park was annexed to the imperial parks under the name New Park. And after the north-eastern part of the Alexander Park from the palace to the Egyptian Gate was built upon in the early twentieth century, the Fiodorovsky Gorodok, an architectural ensemble in the style of Early Russian masonry residences, was constructed to house the Tsar’s escort.

The Chapelle

Between 1825 and 1828 a pavilion appeared on the edge of the Alexander Park in the Landscape Park that was given the French name Chapelle. It took the form of a small Gothic church dilapidated by time.

Adam Menelaws’s design for the Chapelle consisted of two square-based towers, one of which had totally “collapsed”, and a broad arch connecting them. Among the deliberate echoes of the Gothic period was the architect’s installation of coloured glass in the windows of the building. Light penetrating them gave a spectral shimmer to the interior. The figures of angels at the base of the vaults were, like the sculpture on the White Tower, the work of Vasily Demuth-Malinovsky, while the statue of Christ that stood in the Chapelle (and is now in the collection of the State Hermitage) was commissioned by Dowager Empress Maria Fiodorovna from the German sculptor Johann Heinrich von Dannecker.

The Chapelle was damaged during the war and is at present in a state of conservation.

The Arsenal

In 1819 in the centre of the former Menagerie in the Landscape Park (the Alexander Park), on the site of the Monbijou pavilion that had been partially dismantled at the start of the century, construction of the Neo-Gothic Arsenal began to the design of Adam Menelaws. It was completed only after the architect’s death, in 1834, and the decoration of the interiors was finished by the architect Alexander Thon.

We can judge what the interior decoration of this unique pavilion was like from watercolours produced by the artist Alois Rockstuhl over a period of twenty years. The interiors of the Arsenal were magnificent: the lancet windows containing genuine mediaeval stained-glass purchased in Europe, elegant light “barley-sugar” columns, and murals in the rooms delighted those who saw them. The central element was the “Knights’ Hall” located on the second storey. It contained the finest part of the collection of arms and armour that belonged to Emperor Nicholas I. Separate groups of items, linked by some common theme, were displayed in each room. Dummies in suits of armour created the illusion of a guard in the entrance hall. The Albanian Hall contained extremely valuable items from the imperial collection of Japanese, Chinese, Persian and Turkish arms; by the staircase visitors found a group of figures depicting the knighting ceremony; in the cabinet they could see magnificent Spanish, Italian and German swords, while the library contained firearms.

In 1883, on the instructions of Alexander III, this unique collection was transferred to the Imperial Hermitage, where some of it is now on display in the Knights’ Hall.

The Arsenal suffered considerable damage during the Second World War. At the present time a project has been drawn up for the revival of the building. After the restoration there are plans to use the Arsenal to display the surviving part of Nicholas I’s collection of arms and armour in collaboration with the State Hermitage.

The Llama Pavilion

To the west of the Arsenal pavilion, by, you can see the ruins of the Llama Pavilion that was destroyed during the Second World War.

Adam Menelaws built the pavilion in the Landscape Park (the Alexander Park) in 1820–22 specially for the llamas that Emperor Alexander I had received as a gift from South America. Apart from the stable and an indoor exercise area there was also a fodder store and quarters for the service personnel. All these buildings were interconnected and formed a square complex together with the enclosed inner yard.

The dominant element of the ensemble was the tall three-tier tower rising above the main building with rusticated corners and a distinctive crenellated parapet. It contained living quarters. At the opposite corner in 1860 Ippolito Monighetti constructed a “photographic cabinet”. For a time the photographer Charles Bergamasco and the grand dukes used it as a photographic laboratory.

Under Nicholas II fallow deer brought from southern Mongolia in 1907 were kept in the exercise hall. In the early twentieth century the rooms for the service personnel were converted into apartments for the park wardens.