Babolovo Palace
59°42′31.40″N 30°20′39.92″E / 59.7087222°N 30.3444222°E Babolovo or Babolovka was a
It was in 1780 that
Alexander I of Russia used the palace for his furtive rendezvous with Sophia Velho, a court banker's daughter. He commissioned Vasily Stasov to redesign the palace.[2] The tower was replaced with a huge bath hewn from a red granite monolith. Engineer Agustín de Betancourt had it placed within the room before the walls were constructed. The bath weighed 48 tons and was 196 cm high.
The palace fell into disrepair after the
Architectural features
A stone building was erected to replace the wooden five-room house located at the edge of the forest near the village of Babolovo. The construction began on November 2, 1782, the author of the project was architect Neelov. Asymmetrical in the plan, the one-storey structure was erected on a hill on the bank of the Silver Pond. The two main buildings, converging at an angle, were connected by an octagonal tower covered with a hipped roof. The façades were designed in the neo-Gothic style, with parapets in the form of battlements.[3] The walls made of red bricks were plastered on the outside (excluding the anteroom and the bathroom pavilion), painted white and decorated with rustication. The plinth of the palace and its cornices are made of light Putilov stone. The cornices are decorated with light modules. The door and window platbands had two different designs - the plastered ones were painted white or the platbands were decorated with details of light Pudost stone.[3]
![]() |
![]() |
![]() | ||
The palace in the early 20th century | The famed "Tsar Bath" | The ruins of Babolovsky Palace in 2009 |
References
- ^ "Pushkincity.ru".
- ^ a b "Encyclopaedia of St. Petersburg". Archived from the original on 2007-05-15. Retrieved 2010-09-22.
- ^ OCLC 60754776.