Ice House (Saint Petersburg)

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The Ice House ( Russian Ледяной дом / Ledjanoi dom ) was a palace made of ice in Saint Petersburg in the winter of 1739/40 .

Traditionally, in very cold winters, ice installations were built on the Neva as fortresses to train soldiers and entertain the residents. In the winter of 1739/40 with temperatures of −40 ° C, AD Tatishchev, General and Chief of the St. Petersburg Police, suggested the construction of the Ice Palace. Cabinet Minister Artemi Wolynski passed the idea off as his own. Pjotr ​​Jeropkin was involved as an architect and Georg Wolfgang Krafft as an engineer.

At the first attempt the house got too big, so that the surface of the ice bent and water flowed into the house. The new place was chosen between the Winter Palace and the Admiralty, where the Castle Bridge is today.

Blueprint

The house was 16 m long, 5 m deep and 6 m high; the walls were an average of 3 feet thick, built from blocks of ice weighing 120 kg. During construction, they carried out scientific experiments, including experiments on glaciology .

The carved gable porch divided the house into two parts. Each part contains two rooms: there was a living room, a dining room, a bedroom and a toilet. Furniture and household items were made of ice. In one of the rooms there were two mirrors, a dressing table, some candlesticks, a large bed, a chair, and a fireplace with firewood made from ice. The second room contained a carved table, two sofas, two armchairs and a small cupboard for a tea set with glasses, as well as for wine glasses and dishes. The corners of the room were decorated with two statues of Cupid. To the right of the house stood a life-size elephant and a group of ice Persians. Two mortars and six six-pound ice cannons were posted near the entrance. They survived the attempt to fire them with four ounces of powder without damage.

Marriage of court jester in ice house ( Wedding at the House of Ice ; Valery Jacobi , 1878)

From January 27 to February 17, 1740, the Russian interim Tsarina Anna Ivanovna gave "various celebrations for the grandees of her court in this magical palace", each more splendid than the previous one. The first balls were reminiscent of the Venetian Carnival. The highlight was the wedding of her court jester Prince Mikhail Alexejewitsch Golitsyn on February 6th. The Christian Kalmückin Avdotya Buscheninowa Anna had complained against her loneliness. After Golitsyn had secretly married an Italian woman and adopted the Catholic faith, Anna had made him a court jester and now forced him to marry this "girl from the lowest class". After the church wedding, the bride and groom were placed in a large cage carried by an elephant and accompanied by over 400 people, some of whom rode on camels, some on sledges pulled by reindeer, pigs, dogs, goats and cats. The wedding bed was of course also made of ice. On the express orders of the Tsarina, they had to spend the whole night in it.

The events were reflected in Ivan Lazechnikov's novella Ledjanoi dom from 1835 and Yuri Nagibin's story Kwasnik i Buscheninowa from 1986.

A replica of the ice house was built in 1888.

literature

  • Georg Wolfgang Krafft: True and elaborate description and illustration of the remarkable house of Eiss erected in January 1740 in St. Petersburg, with the household appliances that were in it: along with some useful comments about the cold in general, and those in particular that were in the imagined year felt through all of Europe ; St. Petersburg; Printed by the Kayserl. Academie der Wissenschafften, 1741. (He does not write anything about the court jester's wedding here.).
  • Serena Vitale: The Ice Palace, Twenty Tales from Russia , Berlin 2001 (the story "The Ice Palace" is explicitly about the wedding of the court jester).

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