Pavlovsk with the Palace and the Park

About the tour

Pavlovsk makes no attempt to dazzle. After the gold of Peterhof and the baroque sweep of Tsarskoye Selo it seems restrained almost to austerity — and that is precisely the point. Catherine II gave these lands to her son Paul in 1777, and the building was taken on by a Scot, Charles Cameron, a devotee of antiquity: the palace was founded on 25 May 1782, yellow and white, with a Corinthian portico and a dome on 64 Doric columns.

Nearly every major architect of the age worked on the residence afterwards — Vincenzo Brenna, Quarenghi, Voronikhin, Rossi — but the true mistress of Pavlovsk was Maria Feodorovna, Paul’s widow, who lived here for three decades after his murder and assembled the house you will see.

The war left the palace as burnt-out walls. Restoration continued until 1970, owed in large part to the museum’s director Anna Zelenova, who evacuated the collections before the occupation and then spent thirty years putting Pavlovsk back together. The ensemble is now on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The drive from the city takes about forty minutes.

What you will see

• The Pavlovsk Palace — of more than three hundred rooms, forty-five are open to the public. The Italian Hall beneath the dome, the Greek Hall with its colonnade, the state apartments of Paul and Maria Feodorovna with furniture made to the architects’ own drawings, and the collections of antique sculpture and painting the couple brought back from their European journey.

• The Slavyanka valley — the heart of the park: a winding river, bridges and stands of trees composed like a painting. This is the work of Pietro Gonzago, a theatrical scene painter who conceived the park as a sequence of stage sets.

• The Temple of Friendship — a rotunda with Doric columns on a bend of the Slavyanka, Cameron’s first building at Pavlovsk and a gift of thanks to Catherine II.

• The Apollo Colonnade — a double ring of columns, partly brought down by a storm in the early nineteenth century; it was decided not to rebuild the ruin, and in that state it became the romantic emblem of the park.

• The Rose Pavilion — Maria Feodorovna’s favourite place and the literary salon of her day, recreated in 1996.

• The mausoleum “To My Benefactor Spouse” — the memorial to the murdered Paul I deep in the New Sylvia, the most secluded spot in the park.

• The Pil Tower — from outside a ruined water mill with crumbling plaster, all of it painted by Gonzago’s brush; inside, an elegant salon.

Why go with a guide

The Pavlovsk park covers 600 hectares and seven landscape districts: the Slavyanka valley, the White Birch, the Old and New Sylvia, the Great Star, the Red Valley and the Parade Ground. On your own it is easy to walk three kilometres here and see nothing but trees: the pavilions are scattered, signage is sparse, and the logic of the views Gonzago composed does not read without explanation.

A guide supplies what makes this worth visiting second or third after Peterhof: what kind of man Paul was — the “Russian Hamlet”, four years on the throne and murder in his own castle; why the arms of Pavlovsk carry a Maltese cross; how Maria Feodorovna turned her mother-in-law’s gift into her life’s work; and how one of the most romantic features of the park came about by pure accident, through an oversight.

The tour is private: your own guide and car, collection from your hotel or apartment, and tickets to the palace and park included. In the park your guide works with you alone; inside the palace the visit is made as part of a group.