Catherine Palace

Rastrelli rebuilt the palace for Elizabeth between 1752 and 1756 as a three-hundred-metre front in blue, white and gold, with an enfilade of state rooms running its length. The famous room is the Amber Room: panels of amber mosaic backed with gold leaf and mirrors, given to Peter I by Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia in 1716 and installed here, expanded over decades into a chamber that was called a wonder of the world. In 1941 the Germans dismantled and removed it to Königsberg; it was last recorded there in 1944 and has never been found, with theories running from destruction in the 1945 bombardment to concealment. What visitors see is a full recreation, made in St Petersburg between 1979 and 2003 using Baltic amber and archive photographs. The rest of the palace was gutted in the war and has been restored room by room over seventy years, with work still going on.

History

After the Great Northern War Russia regained the farm of Saari Mojs, or Sarskaya Myza, on a 65-metre hill, and in 1710 Peter the Great gave the estate to his wife Catherine I; its village, first called Sarskoye Selo, became Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar's Village. In 1723 a two-storey Stone Palace of sixteen rooms by Johann Friedrich Braunstein replaced the wooden house, with a terraced garden by Jan Roosen, and under Empress Elizabeth Mikhail Zemtsov designed a new palace in 1744, which Andrei Kvasov and Savva Chevakinsky stretched to 300 metres with side wings, a chapel and galleries with hanging gardens. In the early 1750s Bartolomeo Rastrelli joined the buildings into one, with white columns, sky-blue walls and gilded stucco that needed almost 100 kilograms of gold, and Baroque interiors that included the Amber Room; the work ended in 1756 with 40 state apartments and more than 100 private and service rooms, and the palace is part of the World Heritage Site of Saint Petersburg (Wikipedia, Catherine Palace).

What to look for

• The Amber Room - a recreation completed in 2003; the original disappeared in 1945.
• The Rastrelli front - three hundred metres of blue, white and gold baroque.
• The enfilade - state rooms running the length of the building.
• The restoration - a palace gutted in the war and rebuilt over seventy years.

When to go

May to September for the park; the palace is open year-round. Half a day. Timed tickets and long queues in season - book ahead.

Practical notes

The Amber Room is a modern recreation, not the original, which remains missing. Photography inside the Amber Room is prohibited. Queues in summer are severe and independent visitors are admitted after groups. Most interiors are post-war reconstruction.

Nearby

Pavlovsk is a few kilometres south; St Petersburg is north.

Key facts