Tsarskoye Selo
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Catherine Palace and Park |
Tsarskoye Selo (; may be translated as "
Tsar's Village") is a former
Russian residence of the
imperial family and visiting nobility 24 km south of
St. Petersburg. It is now part of the
town of Pushkin and of the
World Heritage Site Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.
In the
17th century, the estate belonged to a Swedish noble. Its original
Finnish name is usually translated as "a higher ground".
Max Vasmer, on the other hand, derives this toponym from the Finnish word for island, "saari". In any case, the Finnish name came to be pronounced by the
18th-century Russians as "Sarskoye Selo", later changed to "Tsarskoye Selo" (i.e., "the royal village").
In
1708,
Peter the Great gave the estate to his wife—future Empress
Catherine I—as a present. She founded the Blagoveschenskaya (
Annunciation) church there in
1724, changing the name of the settlement to Blagoveschenskoye, but this artificial derivation quickly went out of use.
It was Catherine who started to develop the place as a royal country house, building the first Catherine Palace. Currently, there are two imperial palaces: the
baroque Catherine Palace with the adjacent Catherine Park and the
neoclassical Alexander Palace with the adjacent Alexander Park. The Catherine Palace is surrounded by a regular (French) garden and a landscape (English) park, with such 18th-century structures as
Dutch Admiralty,
Creaking Pagoda,
Chesme Column,
Rumyantsev Obelisk, and
Marble Bridge. The landscape Alexander park has several
Chinoiserie structures, notably the
Chinese Village.
By the end of the 18th century, Tsarskoye Selo became a popular place of summer residence among the nobility. The guards regiments were stationed to the south of Tsarskoye Selo, where
Catherine the Great founded in the
1770s the town of Sophia (her own German name being Sophie). The five-domed neoclassical
Ascension Cathedral, designed by the Scottish architect
Charles Cameron, is the chief monument of that area. In
1808, Sophia and Tsarskoye Selo merged and became one town.
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Neoclassical part of Tsarskoye Selo |
In
1811,
Alexander I opened the
celebrated Lyceum next door to the Catherine Palace.
Aleksandr Pushkin was one of the first graduates, followed by
Alexander Gorchakov and
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. The literary traditions of Tsarskoye Selo were continued in the
20th century by such notable poets as
Anna Akhmatova and
Innokenty Annensky.
The town escaped the
19th-century industrialization, although it was between Tsarskoye Selo and St. Petersburg that the first Russian
railroad was built in
1837. It was also known for its powerful government radio station that was set up here in
1917. In the spring of 1917, Emperor
Nicholas II was held under arrest in his favourite residence, the
Alexander Palace.
In
1918, the Tsar's Village was renamed by the
Bolsheviks into Detskoye Selo (Children's Village) and in
1937 it was renamed again to the town of
Pushkin, thus commemorating the centenary of the poet's death.
On
September 17,
1941 the
Nazis occupied the town of Pushkin, destroying, ravaging and plundering many historical monuments, buildings and other cultural artifacts, including the famous
Amber Room. The
Soviets liberated the area on
January 24,
1944. After the war, Tsarskoye Selo has been painstakingly reconstructed up to the present. Many rooms in the Catherine Palace have been restored, but much work on the palatial church and the Alexander Palace is still under way.
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The State Museum of Tsarskoye Selo*
Alexander Palace Time Machine The Alexander Palace Time Machine
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Tsarskoe Selo in 1910 - a guide to the Palaces, Park and Town *
Photo Tours of Tsarskoe Selo*
Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo by Count Paul Beckendorff
