The Garden of the Tsars

By Kelly Raftery

I was seventeen the first time I traveled to the Soviet Union. It was the late 1980s and I had just graduated high school with a load of Russian classes under my belt. My class trip flew to West Berlin then took the train to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg.)  When we arrived, it was late June and that magical time of year they call “White Nights” was just starting. During this time of year, the sun never really sets and Russia’s Venice of the North is bathed in an ethereal glow. It was my first time abroad and predictably, I fell in love.

But I fell in love not with a boy, or even a girl, but with a place.  That love has endured for all these years and I will, unhesitatingly tell anyone who asks that my favorite place in the whole wide world is Peterhof. 

Overview of Peterhof from Chess Mountain.

Peter the Great created his Northern capital out of swampland and sheer stubbornness. Once he was done laying out the street plan and forcing his nobles to relocate, he then looked to developing sites further away from the city. In the early 1700s, Peter chose a site across the Gulf of Finland to build his Monplaisir Palace. Over the years, Peter’s ancestors continued to develop the site and today, the 250 acre grounds include multiple palaces, almost two hundred fountains and an incredible number of statues. The palace interiors are spectacular in their own right, having been lovingly recreated after the Nazis destroyed Peterhof, but my true love lies with the gardens and fountains. 

The spectacular centerpiece of the park is the Grand Cascade, which celebrates a Russian victory over the Swedes. This enormous fountain tumbles down from the Grand Palace to the Sea Canal consists of 64 different fountains and 200 statues and other decorations.  The focal point of the entire ensemble is a statue of Samson prizing open the jaws of a lion, from which a 20 foot fountain of water shoots skyward.

Topmost part of the Grand Cascade Fountain.

Detail of Samson and Lion, 
center of the Grand Cascade.

As spectacular as Samson is, I must admit that it was the trick fountains that I found the most interesting my first visit. In the older, Lower Park, trick fountains of various kinds were constructed to entertain (and soak) unsuspecting royal guests. In one fountain, water sprays out of harmless looking trees and eternally blooming flowers.  

Water sprays from fir trees, drenching passers-by.

Another fountain consists of giant umbrellas surrounded by rings of stones. When the water stops flowing over the top, people dash under cover, delighted when the water begins to fall all around them. But then, they are trapped until someone outside finds the proper stone that when depressed, will  stop the water again, enabling a dry escape. 

Umbrella fountains keep running, 
until someone finds the trick.

As I grew older, on subsequent visits, I became interested in the other fountains. I developed a certain fondness for Chess Mountain and the dragon that perches at the top. In a clash of symbols, a sun fountain competes with a pyramid not far from the Roman fountains. I learned more about all the statues that people the park, from Adam and Eve to Neptune, Bacchus and Narcissus. 

Narcissus stares at his own beauty in the water's reflection.

One of the facts I found most interesting was that all the fountains are run without a single pump. Originally built with wooden pipes, all the fountains are supplied by a gravity-based system that can operate up to ten hours a day. One very memorable late afternoon visit, I was wandering the gardens alone and hidden behind  a hedge I found a stooped old man, hunched over what looked like a large key he was screwing into the ground. As I stood there, watching him curiously, I realized that what he was doing was turning off the flow of water to the fountains, in the same way it had been done for hundreds of years. It struck me as a moment of continuity in a quickly changing world. 

Just once in your life, you must visit Peterhof during White Nights and let yourself get carried away by the magic. Permit your imagination to supply royal ladies adorned in powdered wigs and layers of petticoats flitting through the gardens. And when you are there, stand under an umbrella fountain once for me. Someone will eventually find the right stone, I promise.

A virtual walking tour of Peterhof can be found at this link:

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/gallery/russian-highlights/peterhof-palace.html

An incredible gallery of photos can be found here:

http://www.ticketsofrussia.com/peterhof/gallery/

The Eighth Wonder of the World

The Amber Room (Янтарная Комната, reads Yantarnaya Кomnata) in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo (Czar's Village) near St. Petersburg was a gift from the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I to his then ally, Peter the Great, in a gesture of celebrating peace between Russia and Prussia. The room was often referred to as the Eighth Wonder of the World due to its rare beauty, but its fate proved to be anything but peaceful.

The room was designed by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter and constructed by the Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram at Charlottenburg Palace in Prussia. Transported to Russia in 18 large boxes, it was originally assembled in the Winter House in St. Petersburg, but later Czarina Elizabeth ordered it to be moved to the Catherine Palace in Pushkino a.k.a. Tsarskoye Selo. The new space was bigger and so more amber was shipped from Berlin. After Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, an Italian architect, who also built many palaces in and around St. Petersburg, redesigned the room, it occupied over 55 square meters (approx. 180 square feet) of wall space, glowed with six tons of gold, amber and other precious stones, and was worth 142 million dollars in today’s money. Czarina Elizabeth used it as her private meditation hall. After the revolution, the room became a part of the museum, well preserved and diligently cared for by the Russian historians and curators.

When Hitler invaded Russia, returning the Amber Room where it belonged was very much a part of his "Operation Barbarossa.” The Russian officials tried to dismantle and evacuate the treasure. Unfortunately due to the amorphous nature of amber, which is a soft stone that grows hard and brittle with age, they couldn’t strip down the ornaments: the amber started crumbling. To preserve the artifact somehow, the keepers covered the room with dull wallpaper, but their efforts proved to be futile. When the Nazi the forces entered Pushkino, the room was discovered and taken apart with typical German efficiency - in 36 hours. The treasure was sent to Königsberg (nowadays Kaliningrad) and re-assembled in a local museum.

The true mystery of the Amber Room begins in 1945 when it was supposedly dismantled again and packed for evacuation because Königsberg was being severely bombed by the coalition forces. Several witnesses claimed that crates made it to the railway station, but no one knows what happened to the illustrious chamber afterwards. Many different hypotheses have been entertained and many individuals tried and even claimed they had found it, but no one ever did. The Soviet Union had sponsored several search missions, none of which managed to solve the mystery. In 1998, a German team announced it found the Amber Room buried in a lagoon. Later, a Lithuanian group declared it found the chamber in a silver mine. Neither turned out to be true. Interestingly enough, bits and pieces of the treasure keep washing out into the world like amber from the sea. An Italian stone mosaic, which proved to be part of the room, turned up in western Germany in 1997 - in the possession of the family of a soldier who belonged to the deconstructing team in 1941. Some gold remnants were also found in a small town near the German-Czech border.

Experts say it is unlikely that the room was entirely destroyed by bombing because no burnt amber was found around the Königsberg's museum. Another theory was that the treasure was put aboard Wilhelm Gustloff, the German flagship that sank shortly after it sailed from Gotenhafen, struck by three Russian torpedoes. A radical idea that the Soviets destroyed the artifact themselves was met with great indignation from Russian historians, who had embarked on the room restoration mission in 1979. Originally, the restoration team counted only three amber carvers with the appropriate skill level, but eventually it grew. The project took over 20 years and was finally completed in 2003, largely due to the fact that Germany donated $3.5 million dollars to the effort. The new room was opened on the 300-year anniversary of the city of Saint Petersburg by the joint endorsement of the Russian President Vladimir Putin and the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. And thus, the room’s turbulent fate was finally at peace.

Except some people are still searching for the world’s largest lost treasure: a recent claim by the Amber Room Organization states that the room was transported to the county of Saalfeld and hidden in an old underground cave. The group is seeking a production company to make a movie about their discovery.