Tsarskoye Selo > Restoration of the palace halls

Restoration of the palace halls

Early in April 1944, after the State Defense Committees decreet the Council of People s Commissars made a decision to restore 'the former exterior of the palace-and-park ensembles of the Catherine, Alexander and Pavlovsk parks’. It was followed by the Leningrad City Council’s decision to take urgent measures for preservation of the damaged architectural monuments.

The museum’s research workers Vera Lemus, Eugenia Turova, Anatoly Kuchumov, Galina Netunakhina, Maria Myshkovskaya, Zinaida Skoblikova and Elena Gladkova, together with some of the most experienced technical workers, began to search and collect decorative fragments and details, in order to use them in the started restoration. For that purpose special teams were organized that dismantled the ruins and took out thousands of fragments of the artefacts and architectural decorations. Tie saved archives and graphic and photographic materials were used to develop scientific restoration documentation.

The evacuated museum objects returned to Pushkin from Novosibirsk in autumn 1944 and from Sarapul on December 15,1944. All artefacts from the suburban palaces were gathered in the Alexander Palace, which became the Central Depository of Museum Collections of Leningrad Suburban Palaces.

In the late 1940s — early 1950s the restoration began at a number of park structures destroyed or partially damaged during the war, such as the Morea Column, Kagul Obelisk and Upper Bathhouse.

The restoration of the Catherine Palace started in 1957. It was carried out by Special Research and Production Workshops and FasadRemStroy to the restoration design by the architect Alexander A. Kedrinsky.

The revival of the palace-and-park ensemble required extremely complex works and joint efforts of art historians, architects, restoration experts and museum employees.

The first exhibition of items from the museum collection opened in 1958 and the first restored halls of the Catherine Palace in 1959. Those were the Choir and Church Anterooms, the Green Dining Room, the Waiters’ Room and the Chinese Blue Drawing Room, which, unlike the other interiors, escaped fire during the war but were looted and damaged. In the Green Dining Room, the sculptors Edward Maslennikov and Galina Mikhailova recreated and completed the sculptural dicor. In the Chinese Blue Drawing Room, the painter Raisa Slcpushkina, then a senior student of the Mukhina School, recreated an entire multi-figure composition of the silk wall-lining after the prewar black and white photographs and a surviving piece of the silk.

The Maid-of-Honour’s Room, the Bedchamber, the Painting and Sculpture Studies and the Main Staircase were five halls opened for visiting during 1961-3.

The restoration of the Picture Hall in 1967 was a stupendous achievement, given an exceptional decorative complexity of the interior whose walls were nothing but bare bricks after die war. Tremendous work was done by carvers and gilders who recreated the ddcor.

In 1969, the Chevaliers’ Dining Room was finished and work on the Great Hall began, which truly was a project unique in complexity and effort. Only fragments of the original eighteenthcentury parquet remained intact, and those became the basis for its restoration, carried out by Eugene Kudryashov’s team that brought back to life the floors of the Golden Enfilade.

The restoration of the Catherine Palace is continued today by highly qualified painters, woodcarvers, ceramists and gilders. 36 halls, including the Golden Enfilade, have been opened for visitors.

In 2003, the tercentenary of St Petersburg saw the revival of the legendary Amber Room after almost 25 years of hard work.

Tie tercentenary of Tsarskoye Selo in 2010 was marked by the restoration of the Arabesque Hall, the first stateroom of Empress Catherine the Great’s apartments.

Tie colossal work of the restorers gives them a deserved place among the celebrated masters who created Tsarskoye Selo.