What the trees don't talk about (2024) Fotografie door Ekaterina Kastalskaya

The picture was taken by photographer Ekaterina Kastalskaya on February 11, 2024 in Tsaritsyno Park, Moscow.
It was an unusually sunny day for the last month of winter.

In the photo we can see the Grand Palace in Tsaritsyno overlapped with bare black tree branches.
The photograph was shot on SFL T-42 ISO 400 black and white negative film. This is Tasma Type-42 aerial film with a large amount of silver.

The history of the palace in Tsaritsyno is one of the most mysterious. Catherine the Great accidentally saw these places during a walk and immediately fell in love: hilly banks surrounded by mirror ponds, endless fields were replaced by dense forests — "an earthly paradise", according to the Empress. She instructed the court to buy these lands, and her favorite architect, Vasily Bazhenov, to build a lavish royal estate, but the "paradise" quickly cooled.

Construction dragged on for ten years, and then the empress ordered the demolition of the completed palace and replaced the architect with Matvey Kazakov.

Catherine the Great was satisfied with Matvey Kazakov's project. He, a student and comrade of Vasily Bazhenov, faced a choice: to outshine his mentor and ruin his career or to sacrifice his reputation and cause the displeasure of the Empress.

But how can one disobey the Tsarina? Kazakov chose the first: he dismantled Bazhenov's palace and crossed out ten years of work of his teacher. Apparently, this decision was not easy for him: Kazakov sent to Tsaritsyno his assistant, and he rarely appeared there.

Kazakov's palace was also a failure. Five years later, construction was frozen — the money was spent on a new Russian-Turkish war. And in three more years Catherine the Great cheapened the project. She ordered to remove the third floor with a pergola-belvedere, simplify the decor of the towers, and instead of an air fence to make a black roof of sheet iron. Kazakov's idea fell apart.

In 1796 Catherine the Great died; the exterior decoration of the palace was finished, but the interior was not finished in time — Paul the First stopped the work. It is not known how the interiors were planned to be decorated - the drawings have not survived. The Tsaritsyn Palace eventually turned into ruins.

And only two centuries later, in 2005, the palace began to be restored. But not as Matvey Kazakov had planned, and not as the Empress wanted, but in the middle: the towers and roof were recreated according to the first project, while the two floors were left as in the second version.

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