TSARITSYNO PARK, Tsaritsyno Park

Hi, my name's Marcy, and I’m your personal guide. Along with MyWoWo, I’d like to welcome you to one of the Wonders of the World: Tsaritsyno Park.

The magnificent Tsaritsyno Park, with the adjoining Grand Palace, was  meant to be the summer residence of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. In fact, the name of this wonderful place comes from the term “tsaritsa", which means tsarina.

In 1775, the empress fell in love with this green space and, after buying it, commissioned the architect Vasily Bazhenov to build her a palace. We don't know exactly what went wrong, but the fact is that when the work was almost completed, Catherine decided to demolish everything and to start from scratch using another architect, Matvey Kazakov.

The project was probably doomed from the start, because it wasn't completed the second time around either, this time because of the death of the empress.

Unfortunately, none of her successors were interested in the estate, so it fell into disrepair for about two centuries. At the beginning of the new millennium, the Russian government saw the palace’s potential and finally completed the unfinished project....