Qualla: Tsarskoye Selo

Tsarskoye Selo: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Catherine Palace is the wrong color for a building that has held this much sorrow. It is turquoise — a bright, almost springtime blue — with white columns, gold capitals, and a long Baroque facade that runs for 325 meters along its parade court. Bartolomeo Rastrelli built it for the Empress Elizabeth in the 1750s, and on a clear summer day with the gilt blazing in the sun it can look like a confection rather than a building. Inside, in 1942, the Wehrmacht stripped what they could carry, including the panels of the famous Amber Room, which has never been recovered. Outside, in the long shaded park, the gravel paths still lead to the same pavilions, the same artificial lake big enough for small sailboats, and across to the smaller, more melancholy Alexander Palace where a family was held under house arrest in 1917.

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Tsarskoye Selo: From Saari-mois to Tsar's Village

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before the Russians arrived, the place was Swedish Ingria, and a small Finnish village called Saari-mois stood on the rise where the palaces now stand. When Peter the Great took the mouth of the Neva from Sweden in the early 1700s and founded Saint Petersburg, he gave the estate ...

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Tsarskoye Selo: Catherine's Park, Pushkin's Lyceum

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Catherine the Great inherited it next and made it more than a palace — she made it an idea. She built Charles Cameron's gallery, the Chinese village in the park, the pink Turkish bath, the Pyramid where her favorite dogs were buried. The Palladian Bridge over the lake. The Camero...

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Tsarskoye Selo: The Alexander Palace

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Five hundred yards from the Catherine Palace, across the formal park, stands a quieter and lower building in pale yellow, finished in the 1790s by Giacomo Quarenghi for Catherine the Great's grandson — the future Alexander I. It is the Alexander Palace, neoclassical and reserved ...

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Tsarskoye Selo: The First Railway in Russia

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is one more first associated with this place. In 1837 the Tsarskoye Selo Railway opened, running between the imperial estate and Saint Petersburg — the first public railway in Russia. The Tsar's family no longer needed to travel by carriage along the dusty road south. Their...

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Tsarskoye Selo: What the War Did, and What Came After

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Wehrmacht occupied Pushkin from September 1941 to January 1944, and the damage was catastrophic. The Catherine Palace was looted and partly burned. The Amber Room, gifted to Peter the Great by Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia in 1716, was disassembled and shipped to Königsberg,...

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