The mansion went up in 1806 and passed through several hands before its most famous chapter. Its most notable owner was Pyotr Papkov, a governor of Taganrog, and it was here that Alexander I stayed on two visits - first in 1818, then again in 1825, when he came south with his ailing wife, the Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna. On that second stay he never left. Having caught a chill in Crimea that worsened into typhus, the emperor sickened and died in these rooms on December 1, 1825. He was 47, apparently healthy weeks before, and hundreds of miles from Saint Petersburg. A reign of nearly a quarter-century - the reign that had outlasted Napoleon - ended in a provincial house by the Sea of Azov.

The circumstances were strange enough to breed doubt. Alexander had died suddenly, in a remote place, and mourners who viewed the body said the face had changed so much that the coffin was sealed early. Out of these facts grew one of imperial Russia's most durable legends. About a decade later, a mysterious wanderer named Feodor Kuzmich appeared in Siberia - a hermit of unusual bearing and education, revered by locals for his piety. Whispers spread that the emperor had faked his death in Taganrog and vanished into the wilderness to live as a penitent monk. Historians overwhelmingly reject the tale. But it captivated the public and even the elite; Leo Tolstoy was drawn to write about it, and the question, unprovable either way, has never fully died.

The grieving Empress Elizabeth bought the house where her husband had died and turned it into something new for Russia: the country's first memorial museum, established in 1826 to honor the late emperor. A church, the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross, was built within the mansion. Over the decades the shrine drew remarkable visitors - later emperors Alexander II and Alexander III, the poets Alexander Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky, the great seascape painter Ivan Aivazovsky. To stand where a sovereign had died was, for nineteenth-century Russia, a pilgrimage of a kind, and this small house on a Taganrog street became a place where the empire came to remember one of its own.

The house has a quieter claim on literary history, too. For twelve years beginning in 1864, an amateur choir led by Pavel Chekhov sang in the memorial church - and among the boy sopranos and altos in the late 1860s and early 1870s were his sons Alexander, Nikolai, and a young Anton Chekhov. Long before he became one of the world's great playwrights and storytellers, the future author of The Seagull sang here as a child, dragged to rehearsals by a demanding father. The memorial museum finally closed in 1928, its relics dispersed to the nearby Alferaki Palace. Today the building serves a gentler purpose, housing a children's sanatorium named Beryozka - the little birch tree.