Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve

The Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve is a palace-and-park ensemble in the south of Moscow, the city's largest museum-reserve, comprising a complex of 18th-century buildings, the Tsaritsyno Ponds, and a landscape park. The territory, known from the late 16th century as the estate of Bogorodskoye and later as the wasteland of Chornaya Gryaz ("Black Mud"), was granted by Peter I in 1712 to the Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir. In the spring of 1775, passing by the estate, Empress Catherine II was charmed by it, and in May of that year she purchased the estate from Prince Sergei Cantemir for 25,000 rubles; on the advice of her favorite Grigory Potemkin, she gave the estate a new name — Tsaritsyno.

Catherine entrusted the creation of the imperial residence to the architect Vasily Bazhenov, who worked on the pseudo-Gothic ensemble for about ten years — Tsaritsyno became the largest structure of its kind in 18th-century Europe. However, in June 1785, having inspected the nearly completed construction, the empress was displeased with it, and in January 1786 Bazhenov was removed from the project. The new design for the Grand Palace was entrusted to his pupil, Matvei Kazakov, who in 1786–1796 erected a monumental building on the site of Bazhenov's dismantled structures, while preserving certain Gothic motifs. Construction, halted in 1790 because of expenses from the war with Turkey, resumed in 1793 under a revised design of reduced height. After Catherine II's death in November 1796, the new emperor, Paul I, halted all work at Tsaritsyno, and the palace was left without completed interior decoration — it never became a residence.

Throughout the 19th century the abandoned palace, covered by a temporary black roof, was regarded by contemporaries as gloomy ruins and earned the nicknames "the coffin" and "the catafalque." In 1927 a local history museum opened in one of the buildings, but it was closed in 1937, after which there was discussion of converting the buildings into a sanatorium or a factory. The complex received museum-reserve status in 1984, and its present name in 1992. Systematic restoration of the main structures was carried out in the 1990s by the museum's own staff, and in 2005–2007 a large-scale, and repeatedly criticized, reconstruction took place, during which the ruined Grand Palace was rebuilt from scratch; the ceremonial opening of the ensemble took place in August 2007. Today the museum complex includes the Grand Palace, the Bread House, the Opera House, the Figured Gate and bridges, and the largest musical fountain in Moscow operates on the Middle Pond.