Pella Palace

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Giacomo Quarenghi's copy of Ivan Starov's design for the palace

Pella Palace is a former summer residence of Catherine II of Russia. It was situated on the left bank of the Neva River, 30 km east of Saint Petersburg, where the town of Otradnoye now stands.

Extremely fond of her grandson Alexander, the Empress liked to think about him as the new Alexander the Great. In November 1784 she purchased the estate of Pallila (also called Ivanovskaya Myza) from the heirs of Ivan Neplyuev. Early in 1785, she visited the manor in the company of her lover, Prince Potemkin, and determined to build the grandest of her residences there. Its name was changed from Pallila to Pella, in order to remind Catherine about the birthplace of Alexander the Great.

Potemkin's favorite architect, Ivan Starov, was instructed to recreate the palace of the ancient rulers of Macedon in the Neoclassical style and to suitably adorn the residence with antique objets d'art. In order to accomplish the task, Starov obtained copies of Étienne-Louis Boullée's grandiose designs for rebulding the Versailles Palace. His design for Pella, modeled on Boullée's unexecuted project, pleased the Empress so much that she declared to her European correspondents: "all my summer residences are mere huts if you compare them with Pella, which rises like Phoenix from ashes".

Post station in Pella

The Empress invested into the project the exorbitant sum of 823,389.93 roubles before the Russo-Turkish War, 1787-1792 broke out and construction works were suspended (on 3 November 1789). The shell of the palace, with a riverside frontage stretching for 500 meters, remained in situ until December 1796, when Catherine's successor Paul, eager to obliterate the memory of his mother's undertakings, ordered the palace to be demolished and materials to be reused for construction of St. Michael's Castle in St. Petersburg. Only several outbuildings and a post station survived his short reign.