Qualla: Constantine Palace

Constantine Palace: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrey Korchagin from St. Petersburg, Russia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Peter the Great wanted his own Versailles. As early as 1709 he was sketching plans for a palace on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland that would surpass anything in France, with grand fountains spraying continuously through the summer. The Italian architect Sebastiano Cipriani's first plan was too complex. The French architect Jean-Baptiste Le Blond got the commission in 1715 and died four years later. The Italian Nicola Michetti took over and laid the foundation on June 22, 1720. Then a German hydraulic engineer named Burkhard Münnich looked at the elevations and told Peter the truth: keeping the fountains running would flood the surrounding river basins, much of which sat below ten meters above sea level. Peter abandoned the dream. He built his Versailles a few kilometers west, at Peterhof. The palace at Strelna stood unfinished for a long time, eventually completed and reworked by Voronikhin and Stackenschneider, gutted by the Wehrmacht, restored by 1950, and then, in 2000, absorbed into the property portfolio of the Russian presidency.

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Image: Andrey Korchagin from St. Petersburg, Russia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Constantine Palace: The Grand Duke's House

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rakoon, CC0. In 1797 Tsar Paul I gave the still-evolving estate to his son, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich. The palace took his name. Konstantin was the second son, technically not in line for the throne, and after a fire in 1803 the architect Andrey Voronikhin and the Italian-trained Luigi ...

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Image: Rakoon | CC0

Constantine Palace: Soviet Years

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GAlexandrova, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the October Revolution the palace was nationalized and put to a long sequence of utilitarian uses. The First Strelna School-Colony moved in. Then in 1937 it became a sanatorium. Soviet Navy command training courses followed. When the German army occupied this stretch of the...

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Image: GAlexandrova | CC BY-SA 4.0

Constantine Palace: The Palace of Congresses

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Collin Jackson, CC BY 2.0. In 2000 the palace and roughly one hundred and forty hectares of surrounding land were transferred to the Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation. A massive restoration program followed. Facades and interiors were rebuilt from old drawings. Hydraulic engineers deep...

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Image: Collin Jackson | CC BY 2.0

Constantine Palace: Where Heads of State Meet

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carmelrmd, CC BY-SA 3.0. In July 2006 the Constantine Palace hosted the 32nd G8 summit. Vladimir Putin, then president, brought George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Angela Merkel, and the others to walk through Peter the Great's never-quite-Versailles and to sit at meeting tables in rooms that had...

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Image: Carmelrmd | CC BY-SA 3.0

Constantine Palace: The Statue and the Collection

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steven Pavlov, CC BY-SA 4.0. At the main entrance now stands an equestrian statue of Peter the Great, a copy of one originally cast in 1910 for the bicentenary of the Treaty of Nystad and erected in Riga. The Riga original was hidden in a Latvian forest during Soviet times, recovered, and restored by entrepr...

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Image: Steven Pavlov | CC BY-SA 4.0