Residents of Petrograd are well aware of the original façade of a two-story house located on Millionnaya Street, now around the corner of Moshkov Lane. Against the background of dark brown walls, a portico with columns of dark gray marble, apparently Greek chippolino, from the island of Euboea stands out beautifully. The history of this old house, bearing number 22 along Millionnaya, is as follows. It was built in the thirties of the eighteenth century and belonged to General Biron, brother of the famous temporary worker Anna Ioannovna, then passed into the hands of Count Apraksin, who owned it until 1794. The next owners were successively Count Kochubey and Prince Kurakin. From 1822 to 1874, the house was owned by Potemkin, who was the governor of Petrograd, marshal of the nobility and husband much more famous than himself for his influence at court, his kindness and participation in the affairs of the church and charity Tatiana Borisovna Potemkina, born Princess Golitsyna. From 1874 to 1903, the famous statesman Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev owned the house, and finally, in 1903, the current owner acquired it.

The current prince Abamelek-Lazarev grew up in the house of the Armenian church on Nevsky. According to childhood memories, this house was so dear to the prince that when he decided to add a new spacious house along the Moika to his mansion on Millionnaya, he reproduced in this new house an exact copy of the two halls of the old Armenian house of the architect Felten and gave the facade of this house (Moika , 21) a view similar to the house of the Armenian church on Nevsky, 40. Moreover, from the house on Nevsky, the prince transferred six figured stoves and doors to the newly built house on the Moika. The copy of these two halls turned out to be perfect and most accurate. Two of these kilns are monumental and imitate the famous monument of Lysicrates in Athens.

Now both houses are connected into one so that an uninitiated person would never guess that these are two completely different, interconnected houses.

The main attraction of the old Biron house is a magnificent lobby and staircase. Boldly and easily, steps wind up, from the last platform, decorated with a huge mirror, diverging in different directions. A beautiful, light ceiling in a semicircle gives this whole staircase great elegance and style. On the grounds there are huge white and gold floor lamps, painted by Rossi for the Mikhailovsky Palace. What is now the Museum of Emperor Alexander III. Directly from the stairs you find yourself in a large white room with beautiful stucco work in gentle tones. Here, as well as throughout the house, excellent parquet. To the right and to the left of this hall, with windows facing the millionth, lies a series of living rooms, ending on one side with a corner bedroom and on the other a large living room, with magnificent Flemish tapestries on the walls. In all rooms you will find excellent antique bronze, marble, porcelain, family portraits by famous artists. In the hall rise from the floor four colossal, more than a man's height candelabra of Thomir. On the walls are two huge tapestries representing the history of Tamerlane and Bayazet, executed in the 17th century. in Brussels.

The old house ends with a long white dining room and then you move on to the new building. The connection is an original oval passage, in which are placed four lovely oil paintings depicting four young women by Bode, a student of Van Loo. Bode painted Sanssouci for Frederick the Great. Adjacent to the new Felten-style house, the building of the home theater was built in the last two years according to the plan of the architect A. I. Fomin. Both the residential building from the Moika and the theater hall overlooking the Moika have two separate entrances from this embankment.

The doors of attractions were opened in honor of the International Day for the Preservation of Monuments and Historic Sites.

On April 18, International World Heritage Day, the doors of architectural monuments should be open to guests, no matter who lives in them. How showed Poll "Karpovka", few Petersburgers are aware of their right to visit usually closed attractions. This was decided to correct by the Commissioner for Human Rights in St. Petersburg, Alexander Shishlov, who "Cult Camp" - a tour of two old buildings. On ordinary days, the Abamelek-Lazarev mansion and the House of the residential insurance company "Salamander" are inaccessible to the townspeople - three Smolny committees live in them. Architectural monuments were visited by Karpovka and found out what was left of the owners from the century before last and in what conditions three city departments work.

Abamelek-Lazarev Mansion

Where: Millionnaya, 22
Occupies: Committee for Physical Culture and Sports of St. Petersburg

The first owner of the mansion on the future Millionnaya, and then German, street was the brother of the famous Admiral Count Apraksin.

Main staircase

After the death of the new owner, a long series of changes in the owners of the plots and the house began. The building has been repeatedly rebuilt to suit new architectural tastes or for utilitarian reasons. The last owners were the princes Abamelek-Lazarev.

This family was fabulously wealthy. They inherited a huge fortune from the Georgian kings and Italian princes. In addition, Semen Semenovich Abamelek-Lazarev, the owner of the house, owned a Perm estate - a site in the Urals with huge metal deposits and metallurgical plants.

Even before buying the mansion on Millionnaya, the Abamelek-Lazarev family owned villas in Rome, Florence, a mansion in Nizhny Novgorod and a house at 40 Nevsky Prospekt, at the Armenian Church. The last building was supposed to go to the Armenian community after the death of Semyon Semyonovich's father, so the son had to buy a mansion near the Palace Square. But the entrepreneur was in no hurry to finally part with his rich nest.

The house on Nevsky was filled with numerous treasures and works of art. When Semyon Semenovich moved to Millionnaya, he asked the council of the Armenian church for permission to take some items in memory of his family. Having received it, the prince moved parquets, doors, window frames, stoves, molded cornices, as well as most of the paintings, sculpture and mirrors.

Egyptian room. Aesop (1981) was filmed here.

When he was forcibly stopped, the newcomer demanded that, during the restructuring, exact copies of some rooms of the house on Nevsky be erected in the mansion on Millionnaya. At the request of Semyon Semenovich, a home theater was built in the house. It was completed in 1915, so it was used only a few times.

home theater

The interiors have been preserved in a very "budget" version. At the time of the revolution, the situation was much richer. The very rich art collection that the princes Abamelek-Lazarev had also disappeared. Parquet in some rooms, several oak doors, a couple of chairs and a table remained from the previous owners.

Door from the main hall to the theater

Semyon Semenovich died suddenly in Kislovodsk five months before the abdication of the throne by Nicholas II. Widow Maria Pavlovna emigrated and lived abroad until 1958.

front hall

After 1917, the house passed from one organization to another. A successful dental institute with the largest specialized museum in the country lived here. In 1924, the money for the maintenance of the institution ran out, and it was closed. The mansion became the central house of physical culture workers in 1927, and since 1933 the committee for physical culture and sports moved in here, which lives in it now.

House of residential insurance company "Salamander"

Where: Karavannaya, 9
Occupied: beautification committee and transport infrastructure development committee

Courtyard

The tenement house was built in 1906–1911. The project was developed by the architect Pel, who died just at the beginning of construction. For more than a hundred years, the building has practically no “greetings” from the past. The whole house is divided into small parts that are protected or have no value for generations. Several staircases, mosaics on the floor, a bay window on the second floor and an arch with cross vaults in the courtyard have been preserved. The rest of the space was absorbed by the "European-style renovation" of beige walls, tiles and plastic windows.

Guests are invited to walk along the main staircase, one of the local attractions. On the platforms, the front floor is covered with mosaic tiles - also a subject of protection. The main pride of the beautification committee is the metal staircase, which was cast at the famous San Galli iron foundry. According to it, officials regularly go up to the sixth floor: there is no elevator in this part of the building. The building also has a spiral metal staircase, which also looks alien in office interiors.

Entrance to KRTI

In the part of the house, which is occupied by the Committee for the Development of Transport Infrastructure, the wealth is also small: the facade, the entrance porch, the balcony, the cross vaults of the ceiling, the flights of stairs with metal railings painted with green paint. Not a single building of the department is guarded - nothing is left here from the last century.

P.S.

In 2014, CJSC VTB-Development opened the first two business centers of the Nevskaya Ratusha complex. It was originally planned that all the committees of Smolny would move to its main building at the corner of Novgorodskaya Street and Degtyarny Lane. They wanted to sell historical buildings abandoned by officials at auction.

After Georgy Poltavchenko came to Smolny, the fate of the project was in doubt. There were proposals to adapt the "Neva City Hall" for other needs, in particular, for the Palace of Youth Creativity or for officials of the Leningrad Region.

At the end of September 2012, the Acting Chairman of the Committee on Investments and strategic projects Oleg Lyskov said that the idea of ​​moving part of the Smolny committees to the Neva City Hall is being considered again. The official added that there is already a preliminary list of committees that it is advisable to transfer first, since their buildings can be sold the fastest. Due to the sale of old premises, it was planned to buy premises in the new building from VTB Development.

Ksenia Nesterova

The development of the banks of the Moika in the place where the house of Abamelek-Lazarev is now located by the beginning of the 20th century did not differ in great architectural merit. Along with old mansions, not so much beautiful as attractive precisely because of their “antiquity”, there were also faceless buildings of the second half of the 19th century, and in some places the bulk of apartment buildings were already towering. The four-storey house of Prince S.S. Abamelek-Lazarev was not much different from them. The prince planned to build a new, more respectable building with spacious halls, a large dining room and, of course, a theater hall. The old house was dismantled, and in early 1913 the architect I.A. Fomin. The complexity of the task facing the architect was the limited area. There were already houses on both sides, and the new one had to be inscribed in their row. Certain "obligations" were also imposed by the location of the building in the city center, not far from the Palace and Konyushennaya squares. Fomin successfully coped with this, having managed to give the house a monumentality, despite its relatively small size.

The basis of the composition of the facade is a clear system of pilasters of the Corinthian order, rising to the height of all three floors. The pilasters are placed on a low plinth lined with granite. They support a massive entablature, completed above the cornice with a blind parapet. The facade has a sense of calm grandeur, inherent in the best buildings in the style of classicism. On the roof, on the pedestals of the parapet, echoing the granite parapet of the embankment, vases were installed. Thanks to the clarity of the pattern and large forms, the facade of the house immediately attracts attention. It is the building of the palace that creates the impression of the completeness of the space surrounding one of the main squares of St. Petersburg - the Palace Square. Fomin managed to introduce into the architecture of the mansion a note of refined aristocracy, consonant with the nearby Zimny ​​and Marble palaces. But the facade is only a small part of the building, during the design and construction of which the architect Fomin showed an excellent knowledge of classical architecture and a remarkable ability to solve complex planning problems. The ceremonial interiors of the house also give the impression of grandiose and majestic palace halls. It is hard to believe that they were created within the walls of a small city mansion.

The composition of the interiors begins with a vestibule - a small, rectangular room located in the left half of the building. The entire perimeter of the lobby is surrounded by columns and pilasters of the Doric order, lined with dark yellow artificial marble. The proportions of the order are deliberately weighted, and thanks to this, the colonnade, which is not much higher than human height, is perceived as a monumental structure. In contrast to the entrance hall, the front staircase, located nearby, seems especially light and spacious. The staircase successfully fits into a high, well-lit room, covered with a coffered vault. From the top of the stairs you can get into the Grand Dining Room of the mansion, which has three huge windows overlooking the embankment. The dining room is decorated festively, brightly, it is distinguished by the integrity of the volumetric solution and the luxury of decorative finishes. The center of composition here is a loggia with choirs for musicians. It is separated from the whole room by two pairs of tall Ionic columns lined with deep black artificial marble with large dark red and greenish-brown blotches. The columns contrast with the delicate light green tone of the walls, against which white architectural details and white doors with gilded relief decorations stand out brightly. In the center of each of the side walls of the dining room, in an arched frame with columns of the Corinthian order on the sides, there were picturesque panels. The flat ceiling is also decorated with decorative ornamental painting, passing along the edges into a plastically curved ridge; its surface is divided into rhomboid caissons with rosettes of the thinnest pattern. The feeling of artistic richness is also created by other sculptural details: the intricate carving of the cornice, the elegant brackets of the sandriks above the doors, the softly sculpted reliefs in round medallions. Wonderful type-setting parquet organically complements the interior design.

Next to the dining room is the Theater Hall. Its architecture adequately continues the monumental theme begun by the composition of the façade. The main element of the hall is a row of high pilasters of the Corinthian order. Their faux orange-red marble cladding stands out against the gleaming ivory marble walls. Between the pilasters there are doors framed by strict architraves, decorated with reliefs depicting griffins. The plot of the painting of the plafond was suggested by the purpose of the hall: in the center of the ceiling, in an octagonal frame, the quadriga of Apollo, the god of beauty, the patron of the arts, rushing through the clouds, is artistically executed. Along the edge, the ceiling is surrounded by a frieze with images of putti supporting garlands. When creating the Theater Hall, masters I.A. worked together with Fomin. Bodaninsky, who painted the ceiling, and B.I. Yakovlev, who created its sculptural decor.

After the revolution, from 1917 to 1922, the building housed the Office of the Petrograd Criminal Investigation Department, and until 1926 - the Pushkin House. In 1933, the Committee for Physical Culture and Sports of the Leningrad City Executive Committee was located in the mansion. For some unknown reason, during the Soviet era, the vases were removed from the roof parapet.

Embankment of the Moika River, 23