Pushkin and Tsarskoe selo

The birth and development of the palace and park ensemble of Tsarskoye Selo are connected with liberating from the Swedish rule of the old Novgorodian lands on the banks of the River Neva, and the construction of St Petersburg and its establishment as the capital of the Russian state.

These lands had since ancient times been Russian territory. In the twelfth century, the area was known as "the Izhora land of Lord Novgorod the Great", but in the seventeenth century the Swedes occupied it. The return of the territory to Russia began in 1702 when the country turned the tide of the Northern War.

After the Neva campaign, Alexander Menshikov, governor-general of the liberated territory, got the manor as a present/ Then on 24 June 1710, Peter the Great gave it to his future wife Catherine (their official marriage took place on February 1712). The creation of the royal residence began in the 1710s and continued in the 1720s. Nearby a village grew up for housing for court servants. When construction of the palace began the village got a new name - Tsarskoye Selo, which means "Tsar's Village".

After the October Revolution of 1917, they turned the palace and park ensemble into a museum. The new authorities took over the best buildings in the town as educational and health establishments for children. As a result, the town got a new name - Detskoye Selo, which means "Children's Village". On 9 June that same year, Catherine Palace opened as a museum, and nowadays a tour to Pushkin is a must-do for every tourist. In 1937, when the country marked the 100th anniversary of the tragic death of Alexander Pushkin, the town got his name. The reason was that the future poet had received his education in the Imperial Lyceum located in the town. Finally, in January 1983 the palaces and parks got the status of a preserve, and in 1990 this became the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum-Preserve.

A tour the Tsarskoye Selo palace and park ensemble gives a possibility to see a superb monument of world-ranking architecture and garden-and-park design dating from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. A whole constellation of outstanding architects, sculptors and painters made the ideas of their crowned clients a reality here. Tsarskoye Selo is a cluster of very fine examples of Baroque and Classical architecture. It was the first place in the Russian capital where interiors decorated in the Moderne (Art Nouveau) style appeared.

The centre of the ensemble is the Great Tsarskoye Selo, or Catherine, Palace – a splendid example of the Russian Baroque. The sumptuous décor of the Great Hall and the Golden Enfilade of staterooms that includes the world-famous Amber Room now returned to life. Today, as we enter the palace, we can sense the spirit of the times of Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II and admire unique works of fine and applied art.

There are more than a hundred historical monuments in the parks that have a joint area of 300 hectares: grand palaces and intimate pavilions, bridges and marble monuments, and exotic structures imitating Gothic, Turkish and Chinese architecture that invest little corners of the parks with a romantic atmosphere.

The palaces and parks of the unique Tsarskoye Selo ensemble suffered badly during the Second World War. The Catherine Palace was in occupied territory for twenty-eight months and by 1944 had become a burnt-out shell. Now, over half a century after the war, the restoration and reconstruction work that began in the 1950s is unprecedented. The architects and restorers are still today recreating the priceless legacy of the past using the traditional materials and techniques of gilders, stonemasons, stucco-workers and other craftsmen of the eighteenth-and nineteenth centuries.