Ice palace

[1] In the cold winter of 1739–1740, Anna Ivanovna gave an order to build a palace made of ice in St. Petersburg.

The Empress selected prince Galitzine a new wife, an unattractive Kalmyk maidservant Avdotya Ivanovna Buzheninova [ru].

She forced the prince to marry her and displayed the newlyweds in a procession where they rode an elephant, dressed as clowns, and were followed by a number of circus freaks and farm animals.

The Russian reading public was made aware of Anna's mock palace in 1835, when Ivan Lazhechnikov (1792–1869) described her escapade in The Ice House, one of the first historical novels in the language.

This tradition dates back to the 1897,[6] when it was initiated to raise the spirits of tuberculosis patients who came to the town for recuperation over the long winter.

Saparmurat Niyazov, the former president of Turkmenistan, ordered the construction of a huge ice palace near the capital city of Aşgabat in April 2004.

Although the appearance of the original ice palace is disputable, it has been rebuilt each year since 2005 in Saint-Petersburg, Russia and is open to the public.

[1] In 1895, the mining town of Leadville, Colorado, was in an economic slump, due to the depletion of gold and silver ores, and the Panic of 1893.

Gleaming blue-white walls three feet thick surrounded an ice skating rink, restaurants, ballrooms, a merry-go-round, and a toboggan slide.

The colossal structure was built on a site roughly five acres in size, on the west side of Harrison Avenue, using almost 5 tons of ice.

There have been modern developments in ice construction, including the now widespread use of snice as a mortar-alternative, instead of the more simple, but less reliable, use of water alone.