Catherine Palace – How To Experience Life In Imperial Russia

St. Petersburg, Russia is Peter the Great’s “Window on the West,” a dazzling baroque city of white, gold, and pastels — and one of the best reasons to travel to Russia. Catherine Palace is just one of the remarkable palaces remaining from the Russian Tzars.

An Imperial Evening at Catherine Palace

A while back I attended a formal event at Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg as a guest of Empress Catherine II. The Imperial Orchestra greeted us at the palace gate. Following that, the “Royal Guardsmen” escorted us into the Grand Hall for a champagne reception and classical concert. Then our guide toured us through the palace and the Royal Carriages Collection. Dinner and a choir concert at St. John’s Church ended the evening.

Yes, this all happened exactly as described except that I experienced it in the present and not in the 1700s. It was an excursion booked through our cruise ship to Catherine Palace. “An Imperial Evening” re-created an event as it might have occurred in the past to give a taste of court life 300 years ago.

A Princess Cruise

I visited Russia as part of a Crown Princess Scandinavian and Russia cruise. Arriving in Russia, I could hardly believe I was standing in the former USSR. Afterall, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a Communist country closed to most tourists until 1991 when it became Russia again.

St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg, the second-largest city in Russia, was a cold, dreary country and the residents, for the most part, had a hard life. I still saw remnants of the grey, dreary communist type of low-cost, concrete-paneled apartment buildings on our drive outside the city. Residents appeared somber and seldom if ever smiled.  

Even so, St. Petersburg is not a city one easily forgets due to the magnificent palaces remaining from the days of the Russian Empire and Tzars. I literally gasped upon first laying eyes on them.

There is so much richness and awesome beauty in these many preserved and reconstructed palaces that I can barely give justice to them in one post. Today I am focusing on the Catherine Palace.

Catherine Palace

The Catherine Palace is a Rococo palace in Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), 15 miles south of St. Petersburg, Russia. It was the summer residence of the Russian tsars.

The palace is an example of the late Baroque style and famous for its excessively lavish exterior. The complicated stucco facade was clad in over 220 pounds of gold. Many statues adorned the roof as well. The stucco facade is blue and white which differentiates it from the Hermitage which is green and white.

The palace was built in 1717 under the direction of the German architect Johann Friedrich Braunstein. Peter the Great presented the estate on the hill to Catherine I, his beloved wife. At the time it only had 16 rooms.  It became the official summer residence of the Romanovs until the last Tzar, Nicolas.

In 1743, Empress Elizabeth asked the Russian architects Mikhail Zemtsov and Andrey Kvasov to expand and beautify the palace.

Construction ended in 1756, when the palace included 40 state apartments, and more than 100 private and service rooms. A New Garden was added, while the Old Garden was improved with a deepening of the Big Pond, connected to springs 3.7 miles away,

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When the German forces retreated after the siege of Leningrad in World War II, they intentionally destroyed the residence leaving only the hollow shell of the palace behind. Soviet archivists had managed to document a fair amount of the interior before the war, which proved of great importance in reconstructing the palace starting in 1957, by the State Control Commission for the Preservation of Monuments.

Of the 58 halls of the palace destroyed during the war, 32 have been recreated.

Grand Hall – Catherine Palace          

The spacious airy ballroom, the “Grand Hall” or the “Hall of Lights”, with its spectacular painted ceiling includes numerous distinctively decorated smaller rooms including the recreated Amber Room.

The tables were set for a formal dinner and at first I thought this was where we were going to be eating. Unfortunately, it was all for show and we eventually were taken to a restaurant for our meal.

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The Grand Hall, meant for the most important events, is something surreally beautiful. It is a spacious two-story room about 164 feet long. This hall looks gigantic because of the big number of mirrors. They hang on the walls and alternate with double windows, reflecting in one another and making up the illusion of endless space.

 The Great Hall was intended for receptions such as balls, formal dinners, and masquerades. The hall was painted in two colors and covers an area of approximately 10,764 square feet. Occupying the entire width of the palace, the windows on the eastern side look out onto the park while the windows on the western side look out to the palace plaza. In the evening, 696 lamps shine their light on about a dozen chandeliers located near the mirrors.

Amber Room – Catherine Palace

The Amber Room is no doubt the most spectacular hall in the palace and rightly called a wonder of the world.

After other 18th-century renovations, the room covered about 180 square feet and glowed with six tons of amber and other semi-precious stones. The amber panels were backed with gold leaf, and historians estimate that, at the time, the room was worth $142 million in today’s dollars.

The panels of amber were looted by the Nazis and taken to Konigsberg in 1944. They then disappeared. During four decades several missions were organized to discover the Amber Room, and all was in vain. In the 1980-1990s painstaking restoration took place. The government built an exact replica of the Amber Room and opened it to the public in 2003. Since then it has become the most visited part of the palace.

Court Dancers

In the Grand Hall, live music played and court dancers danced to entertain the Empress Catherine. Catherine also came outside to observe a noble couple who arrived by carriage. Trumpets sounded and they performed a dance.

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Imperial Carriage Collection

The former palace stable building houses a collection of well-preserved coaches that once carried Russia’s nobility. The elegance and attention to detail are amazing.

Podvorye Restaurant

Buses took us to a nearby restaurant, the Podvorye, for dinner. Since we took all our meals on our cruise ship, this was our only truly Russian meal. It was a simple meal complete with wine, vodka and caviar but it was not filling.

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Choir Concert

The evening ended with a choir concert at the former St. Jone’s church now serving as the Concert Hall of the Tzar’s village. The Royal Guard again welcomed us and a church choir entertained us with musical selections.

Summary

This amazing evening is a must for those visiting St. Petersburg. Instead of a routine tour through the palace, we were able to imagine what it might be like to actually participate in an evening of entertainment hosted by Empress Catherine II. Actors portraying Catherine and her court were almost believable in part due to the extraordinary surroundings of the restored palace.

The cost may well be over $200 per person but worth every penny in memories.