Wednesday Walk in a country park

Greetings, friends! Today we are going to walk in a very beautiful park and admire the estate architecture, built in a very unusual style for St. Petersburg. We are going to the small town of Pushkin, a suburb of St. Petersburg, to the summer house of Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich.

Another name for the town of Pushkin is Tsarskoe Selo, and you probably know this name, or perhaps some of you have even been to this town: this is where the imperial palaces and parks are located. But today we are going to look at an area that is far away from the imperial residence. This place was secluded and quiet in the nineteenth century, and it is almost the same today. To get to the territory of the estate is not very easy, it is not a museum or even an open park area, there is Pushkin's branch of the Research Institute of Plant Cultivation. But if you are lucky and the back gate is unlocked, you can walk around the territory and admire the unusual architecture. During the walk we will see a lot of greenhouses, some are actively used, others are preparing for the summer season, others are waiting to be renovated.

One of the most authoritative architectural historians B.M. Kirikov called this estate "the starting point of the formation of St. Petersburg Art Nouveau". I am not sure that these buildings can be considered fully St. Petersburg: the first structures that appeared here, the main house and the stables, were designed and made in Britain, they were transported to St. Petersburg in a disassembled form. It was a gift to Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich, a cousin of Russian Emperor Nicholas II, from his godmother, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, for his twentieth birthday.

The buildings that appeared on the estate in later years were built and designed by Russian architects, who made serious efforts to preserve the unity of style. And so it turned out that there is a little piece of Victorian England near St. Petersburg.

This is my entry for the #WednesdayWalk challenge by @tattoodjay and for the #MakeMeSmile challenge by @elizacheng.