Tsaritsyno () is a palace museum and park reserve in the south of Moscow.
It was founded in 1775 as the summer residence of Empress Catherine II, but the construction remained incomplete. For most of its history, it was a half-abandoned park with picturesque ruins. In the 2000s, the palace was restored according to the original plans. Today, it is a museum complex and a leisure place for Muscovites and tourists.
History
During the Russian Empire
Before Catherine the Great The land has been packaged together since the 16th century under Bogorodskoye, when it belonged to Tsaritsa Irina, sister of Tsar Boris Godunov. Over two centuries, it changed hands between several noble owners (including Streshnevs and Galitzines) until Catherine the Great finally bought it from the former owner, Prince Cantemir, in 1775.
During the time of Catherine the Great Catherine the Great wished to use the estate as a summer residence. An essential role in the future fate of Tsaritsyno was played by the fact that it is located in an area that, at that time, was a suburb of Moscow. In the same year, the empress gave the task to her court architect, Vasily Bazhenov, to develop a project for a summer residence near Moscow.
Bazhenov's project
Bazhenov designed the palace in the Neo-Gothic, Moscow Baroque, and Classical styles. He planned Tsaritsyno as a complete mini town:.
The peculiarity of the layout of the Tsaritsyno buildings is such that it allows us to speak of the "poetry of geometry": with the use of symmetry and different geometric shapes embedded in the design. Six octahedrons pavilions are laid in a cruciform; The Small Palace is in the form of a semicircle; the Kitchen Building is in the form of a square with rounded corners. The same applies to the internal layout: round, oval, and semi-oval halls are masterfully combined with rectangular halls. Bazhenov designed almost all the interiors of the Tsaritsyno buildings with vaulted ceilings, which achieved an even more significant effect of the play on geometric shapes.
One of the main features of Bazhenov's project was that there was no main palace as a single building - there are instead three independent buildings. Catherine II liked the project, and construction began in May 1776.
However, by the end of the year, troubles arose with building supplies and funding; this was repeated several times throughout the construction, which lasted for a decade - contrary to the architect's plans to finish it all in three years. Bazhenov wrote numerous letters to officials to determine the reasons for the difficulties. Nevertheless, despite money and material shortages, the previously begun buildings were completed in 1777-1778, and in 1777 the construction of the Figured Gate and the main palace, which consisted of three buildings, began. It ended in 1782; at the same time, work for the Large Cavalry Corps, several outbuildings, and an arch-gallery was started.
In early June 1785, ten years after the beginning of construction, Catherine II arrived in Moscow. The visit was brief. She briefly inspected the palace and left it very disappointed. The verdict of the empress after a quick inspection was harsh: the money spent on construction could have been better spent, the stairs were narrow, the ceilings were heavy, the rooms and boudoirs were cramped, and the halls were dark, like cellars. Catherine ordered "to make a fair amount of deconstruction" and to present a new project for the main palace.
Historians now agree the main reason is that by the year 1785 Bazhenov's palace layout became politically incorrect: relations between Catherine and Crown Prince Paul irreversibly worsened, the empress had thoughts of removing Paul from the order of succession completely, and twin palaces had to make way for a single one – her own. Another reason for the royal anger could be Bazhenov's affiliation with the Freemasons (the architect underwent an initiation ceremony in 1784 on the guarantee of the educator and publisher N.I. Novikov, and was admitted to the Deucalion lodge), and his secret contacts with Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich.
Bazhenov's freemasonry was highly reflected in the Tsaritsyno buildings. The decor of many buildings, the mysterious lacy stone patterns, clearly resemble Masonic ciphers and emblems. Tsaritsyno is often referred to as the "architectural reference book" of Masonic symbols of the 18th century.
Bazhenov was immediately removed from construction, his student, Matvey Kazakov, was appointed the new architect of the Tsaritsyno residence, which was another humiliation for the retired architect. The Empress ordered Kazakov to build a new palace as a single building. More than six months passed after Catherine II's inspection of the Tsaritsyno before a new project for palace development was approved.
Kazakov's Big Palace
By February 1786, Kazakov prepared a project for the Grand Palace, and it was approved by the Empress. In March, the dismantling of two buildings began - the chambers of Catherine and Tsarevich Pavel. In November 1796, Catherine the Great suddenly died. At this time, the construction of the Grand Tsaritsyno Palace had been roughly completed. The building was covered with a temporary roof. Interior finishing work had begun; when all work in Tsaritsyno was stopped, 17 rooms of the Big Palace had parquet floors and ceilings. In the remaining Bazhenov buildings no interior decoration was carried out for the entire previous decade. The new Emperor Paul I visited Tsaritsyno after his coronation in March 1797 and did not like it. On June 8 (19) of the same year, a decree was issued "not to produce any buildings in the village of Tsaritsyno." In the future, the development of the Tsaritsyno buildings did not resume, and the palace ensemble, so long and difficult to build for Vasily Bazhenov and Matvey Kazakov, never became a residential imperial residence.
Imperial residence after Catherine
The unfinished royal residence quickly fell into disrepair. Already at the very beginning of the 19th century, buildings began to collapse and overgrow with greenery like classical ruins.
The emperors following Catherine were not particularly interested in Tsaritsyno, did not live there, and did not try to complete the construction.
However, starting from the reign of Alexander I, Tsaritsyno Park became available for "promenades".
However, the first decade of the 19th century in Tsaritsyno is associated with the activities of P. S. Valuev, the head of the "Kremlin Expedition of Buildings", and I. V. Egotov, a student of Bazhenov and Kazakov, who was the director of the "Kremlin Drawing Expedition" since 1803. Under the leadership of Ivan Egotov, the design of a landscape park was completed: instead of several wooden Bazhenov pavilions, stone park pavilions and gazebos (Milovida, Nerastankino, Temple of Ceres) were built.
Finally, in 1860, after an audit that admitted that the maintenance of the estate did not bring significant income, Tsaritsyno was transferred from the department that managed the royal property to the Department of Appanages. Thus, Tsaritsyno ceased to be the personal property of the imperial family.
Becoming a state property: Tsaritsyno-Dachnoe
After becoming state property, Tsaritsyno was meant to generate income. At first, it was supposed to sell all the buildings for demolition for 82,000 rubles, but no buyer was found. At the same time, Moscow authorities decided to lease out part of the Tsaritsyno lands for dacha development. The idea was hampered by the lack of transport links with Moscow, but the situation changed in 1865 when the "Tsaritsyno'' station of the newly built Kursk railway was opened (it was even renamed to Tsaritsyno-Dachnoye in 1904). The plans for dacha development mainly affected the territories located to the west of the palaces and the historical park but part of the palace estate was also given over to dachas. This part included the First and Third Cavalier Corps with the adjacent palace territories, as well as the fields with greenhouses and orchards from the east.
Tsaritsyno became a holiday destination; in the 1870s, a whole summer cottage village Novoe Tsaritsyno came into existence. Over the years, celebrities rented dachas here or visited friends and relatives: writers F. M. Dostoevsky, F. I. Tyutchev, A. N. Pleshcheev, A. P. Chekhov, I. A. Bunin (here he met his future second wife, Vera Muromtseva), Leonid Andreev, Andrei Bely, N. D. Teleshov, composers M. A. Balakirev and P. I. Tchaikovsky, historians I. E. Zabelin and V. O. Klyuchevsky, naturalist K. A. Timiryazev, Chairman of the First State Duma S. A. Muromtsev. By the beginning of the 20th century, there were about a thousand dachas in Tsaritsyno and nearby villages, despite the fact that those dachas were considered extremely expensive.
The condition of the ownerless palace buildings steadily worsened. Abandoned greenhouses were demolished; some buildings and pavilions were occasionally used, and so underwent cosmetic repairs. But most of the buildings were still in disrepair. In 1880 there was a partial collapse of the roof of the Grand Tsaritsyno Palace; in order to avoid accidents, it was decided to remove the remnants of the roof and dismantle the frames of the Gothic décor of the towers.
During the years of the Soviet Union In the first years of Soviet power, the Tsaritsyno, along with New Tsaritsyno and the nearest villages were combined under the name of Lenino village.
Created in March 1918, the revolutionary local government - the Soviet of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies, - was located in the First Cavalry Corps. In 1932, this building was rebuilt and became a 3-story building (the brick for completion was taken from the inner walls of the adjacent Second Cavalry Corps); it housed the executive committee of the Leninsky district of the Moscow region.
First Museum
In 1926, the palace and park ensemble was transferred to the jurisdiction of Glavnauka, and after - to the museum sub-department of Moscow Department of Public Education. On July 21, 1927, the Tsaritsyno Museum was opened in the building of the Third Cavalry Corps; a year later, the museum acquired the status of a local history museum. The first repair and restoration work in Tsaritsyno also dates back to 1927.
However, the museum did not last long in this form. In 1930, in accordance with the collectivization campaign, the exposition was based on models of agricultural products and diagrams of the development of the Leninsky district; the museum itself began to be called the "Leninsky District Local Horticultural and Garden Museum". Finally, in 1937 the museum was closed, and the village club with a cinema was set up in the building.
Maintenance during Soviet Era
The Khlebny Dom received a new life in Soviet times: in the early 1920s, communal apartments spontaneously appeared here. They lasted until the 1970s. In 1939, the temple on the territory of the palace and park ensemble was closed; the building was given over to host a transformer substation.
In 1936, by the order of the Moscow City Council, architects developed a project for adapting the Tsaritsyno ensemble into a rest house. The implementation of these plans was halted by the Great Patriotic War.
At the end of the 1950s, the Milovida and Nerastankino pavilions, the Golden Sheaf pavilion, and a number of park bridges again required restoration. The work was carried out in 1958-1961. The first project of the scientific restoration of the Tsaritsyno architectural and landscape monuments dates back to the end of the 1960s.
In 1960, Lenino became part of Moscow. In the 1970s, because of the development of the nearby Orekhovo-Borisovo residential area, a security zone with an area of more than 1,000 hectares was established around Tsaritsyno and the cascade of the Tsareborisovsky Ponds.
Restoration (1980s–2000s)