Qualla: Rundāle Palace

Rundāle Palace: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wojsyl, CC BY-SA 3.0. Imants Lancmanis was 31 years old when he was appointed director of Rundāle Palace Museum in 1972. The palace at that point had been a school, a Russian field hospital for Napoleon's wounded, a Bermontian arson target, a Soviet grain storehouse, and most recently the local school's gymnasium - because somebody, at some point in the 1940s, had decided the grand dining room of the most beautiful baroque interior in the Baltic was the right place to install pommel horses. Lancmanis spent the next forty-three years undoing all of it. The restoration was officially declared complete in spring 2015. He was 73.

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Image: Wojsyl | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rundāle Palace: Built for the Empress's Favorite

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pietro Rotari, Public domain. Ernst Johann von Biron was the most spectacularly favored man in the Russian Empire of the 1730s. As lover and chief minister of the Empress Anna Ioannovna, he wielded power so absolute and so resented that the entire decade became known in Russian historiography as the Bironovsh...

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Image: Pietro Rotari | Public domain

Rundāle Palace: Catherine's Gift, Napoleon's Hospital

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeroen Komen from Utrecht, Netherlands, CC BY-SA 2.0. Catherine the Great let Biron come home in 1762. He returned to Rundāle, finished what Rastrelli had started, and brought in the German stuccoist Johann Michael Graff to fill the rooms with the cream-and-gold ornament that still defines the interiors. He had four years to enjoy i...

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Image: Jeroen Komen from Utrecht, Netherlands | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rundāle Palace: The Half-Century Restoration

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Own workАндрей Корзун, CC BY-SA 3.0. What Lancmanis inherited in 1972 was a wreck dressed up as a school. The walls of Rastrelli's grand interiors had been whitewashed for hygiene, then divided with plywood for classrooms. The famous Long Gallery had been turned into a grain warehouse after World War II - the painte...

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Image: Own workАндрей Корзун | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rundāle Palace: The Latvian Versailles

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0. The marketing nickname is unavoidable, even if it understates the place. Versailles is bigger and grander, but Versailles also lacks Rundāle's strange intimacy - the sense, walking through the bedrooms and the bathing room and the duke's private toilet (yes, there is a duke's toi...

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Image: Zairon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rundāle Palace: What You See Now

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daarznieks, CC BY-SA 3.0. Rundāle is one of the things state visitors get shown when they come to Latvia. It is also still a working museum, with regular exhibitions and a steady flow of weekend tourists from Riga 80 kilometers north. The roof line is unchanged from Rastrelli's drawings. The colors of the...

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Image: Daarznieks | CC BY-SA 3.0