Catherine Palace

Listen for a moment. Gravel crunches under hundreds of shoes, and somewhere a guide calls out in a language you may not know. Then you look up, and the colour arrives first. A long wall of sky blue, broken by white columns and by gold that catches the sun. The façade stretches so far that your eyes cannot take it in at once. You have to turn your head, slowly, from one end to the other. Welcome to Catherine Palace, in the town of Tsarskoye Selo, south of Saint Petersburg.

The name Tsarskoye Selo means the Tsar's Village. Today the town carries another name, Pushkin, after the poet who went to school here. But the older name still lives in every guidebook and on many signs. The estate began in the early eighteenth century as a gift from Peter the Great to his wife, Catherine. She later ruled Russia herself as Empress Catherine the First. So the palace is named after her, and not after the more famous Catherine who came later. Many visitors mix up the two women.

The building you see now belongs mostly to their daughter, Empress Elizabeth. She loved celebration, music, masquerades and new clothes. Locals say she owned thousands of dresses, though that story is told more often than it is checked. In the 1750s, Elizabeth gave the palace to her favourite architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli. He was Italian by family, but he spent his career in Russia. He took the older, smaller buildings and joined them into one enormous front. The result runs for more than three hundred metres.

Rastrelli worked in a style called Russian Baroque. Baroque means architecture built for drama — curves, deep shadows, rich decoration and a sense of movement. Look along the façade now. The columns do not stand alone. Between them, carved male figures called atlantes hold up the upper storey on their shoulders. Their faces strain under the weight. In Elizabeth's time, a great deal of this sculpture was covered in real gold leaf. Visitors arriving by carriage would have seen the whole front shine.

Here is a detail many people miss. Look toward the northern end of the palace. Five gilded domes rise above the roofline. They crown the palace church, which is part of the same building. From a distance, it can look like a separate cathedral. But it was built into the palace so the empress could walk to prayer without going outside. In a Russian winter, with snow and wind, that was not only a luxury. It was good sense.

Inside, the most famous room is not the largest. It is the Amber Room. Its story begins outside Russia. In 1716, the King of Prussia, Frederick William the First, gave amber wall panels to Peter the Great as a diplomatic gift. Prussia was a German kingdom on the Baltic coast, where amber washes up on the beaches. Decades later, Elizabeth had the panels moved here. Rastrelli expanded them with mirrors and gilded carving to fill a larger room.

Then came the Second World War. In 1941, German forces occupied Tsarskoye Selo. Soldiers took the amber panels down, packed them into crates and shipped them west to the city of Königsberg. After the war ended, the original panels were never found. Nobody knows for certain whether they burned, were hidden or were broken up. The search has continued for decades. The room you can enter today is a careful reconstruction. Craftsmen worked on it for many years and finished it in 2003.

So when you stand in the Amber Room, you are looking at two stories at once. One is the eighteenth-century design. The other is the patient modern work of artists who studied old black-and-white photographs and rebuilt every piece. Amber is not one colour. It runs from pale honey to deep brown, almost red. Notice how the light changes it as clouds pass outside. The walls look warm, almost like they hold heat. Photography is not allowed inside this room, so give yourself time to simply look.

Before the Amber Room, many visitors walk through the Great Hall. It is a long ballroom, lined on both sides with tall windows and mirrors. The windows and mirrors face each other, so daylight seems to fill the whole space. Gilded carving climbs the walls between them. Above you, a huge painted ceiling shows figures floating among clouds. This hall was built for receptions and balls. Imagine candles in every holder at night, and the reflections repeated again and again in the glass.

The palace has a second personality, and it belongs to Catherine the Great. She came to the throne in 1762 and had very different taste from Elizabeth. She found heavy Baroque gold old-fashioned. She preferred neoclassicism — a calmer style inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. She hired a Scottish architect, Charles Cameron. He designed elegant rooms in soft colours, and also the Cameron Gallery in the park. It is a long open colonnade where the empress could walk and talk while looking out over the gardens.

Those gardens are called Catherine Park, and they are worth at least as much time as the interiors. Near the palace, the paths are straight and formal. Further away, they become winding and natural, in the English landscape style. A large pond sits at the centre. You will find pavilions, bridges, a grotto and a tall column that stands in the water. That column honours a Russian naval victory over the Ottoman fleet. On a quiet morning, you can hear ducks and the wind in the trees.

One more surprise. Just beside the palace stands a building connected to it by an arch. This was the Imperial Lyceum, an elite school that opened in 1811. One of its first students was Alexander Pushkin, later Russia's best-loved poet. He wrote about these gardens and ponds in his verses. A few years later, in 1837, the first public railway in Russia opened. It ran between Saint Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo. The palace town was a place of firsts, not only of luxury.

After the war, much of the palace was a burned shell. Roofs had collapsed, and many rooms were left with bare walls. Restoration began soon after and still continues today. As you walk through, you may notice that some halls feel complete and others feel simpler. That difference is part of the story. Every gilded panel you see was either saved, found again or made by hand in the decades since. The palace is beautiful, but it is also a record of repair.

Now step back onto the gravel and turn toward the long blue front once more. Look at the atlantes still holding up the roof, and at the five golden domes at the far end. Listen to the crowds, the footsteps, the birds in the park. Three empresses shaped this place, and a war nearly erased it. Many hands brought it back. As you walk away into the gardens, look over your shoulder once. The blue wall will still be there, catching the light.