Peterhof Palace

• 1. Introduction

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  Peterhof Palace sits at the edge of the Gulf of Finland, its fountains firing without a single pump. Peter the Great built this place not merely as a home but as a statement directed at a specific monarch: Louis XIV of France. What began in 1709 as a plan for modest country habitation grew into something far more ambitious after Peter visited the French royal court in 1717. He came back determined to build a rival to Versailles on Russian soil. The result earned the nickname "The Russian Versailles" and eventually became a UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside the city center of Saint Petersburg. How did a tsar with no tradition of grand garden palaces pull it off? And what happened when one of Europe's most spectacular complexes fell into the hands of an invading army?

• 2. Peter's Strategic Vision

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  The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 ended the Great Northern War and stripped much of the Swedish Empire's claim to the Baltic Sea, handing it to the rising Tsardom of Russia. Peter had been preparing for this outcome since 1703, when he began building his new capital, Saint Petersburg, on territory he had captured from Sweden along the eastern Baltic coast. The location was no accident. The Neva River flowed from the city to the Gulf of Finland, opening a passage to the Baltic. The island of Kotlin, with its fortress at Kronstadt to the west of the city, served as a commercial harbor and gateway, necessary because the water closer to Saint Petersburg was too shallow for large vessels. Peterhof, then, was never just a palace. It was a declaration that Russia had arrived at the sea, and its Sea Channel, one of the most extensive waterworks of the Baroque period, functioned as a marine entrance into the complex, bisecting the Lower Gardens from the shore.

• 3. Architects and Designers

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  Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond drew the first design for the palace and its garden in 1714, likely selected because of his earlier collaborations with Andre Le Notre, the very man who had landscaped Versailles. Peter himself contributed to the Monplaisir Palace that same year, chalking out not only the building's site but also its interior layout and elements of its decorative finish. The chief architect from 1714 to 1728 was Domenico Trezzini, and the style he developed at Peterhof became the template for Petrine Baroque throughout Saint Petersburg. Peter's ambitions did not stop with his own reign. The Italian architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli was commissioned by Elizabeth of Russia to expand the Grand Palace, adding wings between 1745 and 1755 and completing a broader expansion from 1747 to 1756. What had been called simply "Upper" and was barely larger than any other structure in the complex became the imposing centrepiece visible from both the Lower and Upper Gardens.

• 4. Fountains Without Pumps

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  There are 64 fountains in the Grand Cascade alone, and every one of them runs on gravity. Water drawn from natural springs collects in reservoirs in the Upper Gardens; the elevation difference between those reservoirs and the Lower Gardens below the bluff generates the pressure that drives the entire system. The bluff itself stands 16 metres high and sits less than 100 metres from the shore, a natural feature that made the whole engineering scheme possible. The Grand Cascade was modelled on a cascade Louis XIV had built at his Chateau de Marly. At its heart is a two-storey artificial grotto faced with hewn brown stone, now housing a small museum of fountain history. Below and flanking the grotto, the cascade waters pour into a semicircular pool at the foot of the Sea Channel. In the 1730s, the large Samson Fountain was placed in that pool. It shows Samson tearing open the jaws of a lion, the lion being a figure from the Swedish coat of arms, making the victory in the Great Northern War plain. One of the great battles of that war was won on St Sampson's Day, giving the image a second layer of meaning. From the lion's mouth shoots a vertical jet of water 20 metres high, the tallest in all of Peterhof.

• 5. Gardens and Interiors

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  The Lower Gardens cover 1.02 square kilometres, squeezed between the bluff and the Gulf shore and stretching roughly 200 metres in each direction. They were laid out in the formal style of French gardens of the 17th century, and in recent years the clipped allees have been restored to something close to their original appearance after years of overgrowth. The bluff face below the Grand Palace holds two other cascades beside the Grand Cascade: the Golden Mountain to the west, ornamented with marble statuary, and the Chess Mountain to the east, its broad chute tiled black and white like a chessboard. Inside the Grand Palace, the Chesma Hall is lined with twelve large paintings depicting the Battle of Chesma, a naval victory from the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774. The German artist Jacob Philipp Hackert painted them between 1771 and 1773, though his first attempts were criticised by witnesses as failing to capture the reality of exploding ships: the flying timbers, great flames, smoke, and fireballs. The East and West Chinese Cabinets, decorated between 1766 and 1769, were hung with Chinese landscape paintings in yellow and black lacquer and covered with imitation Oriental patterns applied by Russian craftsmen. East of the Lower Gardens lies the Alexandria Park, which holds Gothic Revival structures from the 19th century, including the Kapella.

• 6. Occupation and Survival

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  German troops captured Peterhof on the 23rd of September 1941. Employees had only a few months between the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the arrival of the German Army, and they managed to save only a portion of the palace treasures. An attempt was made to dismantle and bury the fountain sculptures, but three quarters of them, including all of the largest, were left in place. Two weeks after the capture, on the 5th of October 1941, Soviet forces tried to retake the town. Some 510 marines of the Soviet Baltic Fleet landed on the beach of the neighbouring Alexandria Park. They faced heavy fire immediately. The operation's commander was killed, one landing craft sank, another missed its mark, and coastal artillery from Kronstadt had to be suspended because contact with the landing troops was lost. Evacuation attempts failed under German artillery. Only one marine was pulled from the water. Those who reached the Lower Gardens fought on in hand-to-hand combat until the last pockets of resistance were destroyed on the 7th of October. German Shepherd dogs were released into the gardens to hunt the surviving marines; many of the wounded were mauled to death and several were captured. The occupying forces partially exploded the Grand Palace, looted the Samson Fountain, and destroyed many of the other fountains. Restoration began as soon as the war ended. The Lower Park was reopened to the public in 1945, and a replica of the Kozlovsky Samson Fountain was installed in 1947.

• 7. Name, Memory, and Legacy

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  In 1944, with the war still being fought, the Soviet government renamed the complex Petrodvorets, meaning Peter's Palace, as part of wartime campaigns against anything sounding German. The name "Peterhof" is itself an emulation of the German for "Peter's Court." The original name was not restored until 1997, after the post-Soviet Russian government reversed the wartime change. The palace continues to be restored, a process the source notes is ongoing to this day. The Monplaisir Palace, the Marli Palace, and the pavilion known as the Hermitage all survive from the original construction under Peter the Great, alongside the Grand Cascade and the Sea Channel that once welcomed boats directly into the heart of the complex.