Catherine Palace (Tsarskoye Selo)

The Grand Catherine Palace was the former summer residence of the Russian empresses at Tsarskoye Selo, now a suburb of Saint Petersburg. The first building on the site was laid down in 1717 as a gift to Catherine I and was a modest two-storey structure in the Dutch style. Under Elizabeth Petrovna the palace was repeatedly rebuilt and enlarged by the architects Mikhail Zemtsov, Andrei Kvasov and Savva Chevakinsky, and in 1752–1756 it acquired its present appearance through a large-scale reconstruction by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who gave the building the sumptuous forms of Russian Baroque. The palace's façade stretches for about 325 meters, and more than 100 kilograms of gold were used to gild the façade decoration and the numerous statues on the roof. Despite the palace's strong association with Catherine the Great, the empress herself considered its lavish decoration old-fashioned and ordered a halt to any further gilding of the park statues.

One of the palace's most famous rooms is the Amber Room, whose decoration was created in the early 18th century in Prussia and presented to Peter the Great by King Frederick William I in 1716. In 1755 the amber cabinet was moved to Tsarskoye Selo. During the Great Patriotic War the German occupiers removed the room's decoration to Königsberg, where all trace of it was lost; the ultimate fate of the original remains unknown. The re-creation of the Amber Room by Russian restorers, partly funded by German companies, took almost a quarter of a century and was completed in time for the 300th anniversary of Saint Petersburg in 2003.

The palace is connected by a covered gallery to the wing of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, where Alexander Pushkin studied from 1811 to 1817 — the proximity of the imperial residence and this elite educational institution was part of the design conceived by Alexander I.

During the war the palace suffered severely from the German occupation: many of its halls were looted and burned, and some of the stolen valuables — including parquet floors and bronze sculptures — were later recovered in Germany. Restoration work by the Leningrad school of restorers continues to this day. The palace and the surrounding landscape park form part of the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum-Reserve and are included, together with the historic center of Saint Petersburg, on the UNESCO World Heritage List.