Vorontsov Palace (Alupka)

[3][4] The palace was built between 1828 and 1848 for the Russian Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov for use as his personal summer residence at a cost of 9 million roubles.

By the early 20th century not only many aristocrats, but also members of the Imperial Family, including the Tsar himself, had palaces in an assortment of architectural styles in the vicinity.

[12] Owing to its status as an important local tourist attraction and architectural monument, the Vorontsov Palace and its surrounding park complex were frequently featured in Ukrainian and Soviet cinema productions such as: An Ordinary Miracle (1964), Nebesnye lastochki (1976), Crazy Day or The Marriage of Figaro (2004), and Sappho (2008).

[14] In the period following the Napoleonic Wars, the new city of Odessa emerged as Russia's southern capital with a vibrant cosmopolitan society centred on a handful of Russian aristocrats and Polish noblewomen such as Zofia Potocka and Karolina Rzewuska.

The mid-1820s saw the appearance of highly popular Romantic works celebrating its rugged beauty, such as Alexander Pushkin's poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray and Adam Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets.

[20] In 1824, the architect Philip Elson was commissioned to build a small house for the Vorontsov family to inhabit while the new palace was under construction.

Both these buildings drew heavily on the Islamic motifs, which were later to be evident at the Vorontsov Palace and were new and novel designs at the time of the Prince's visit to England.

Blore's new plan for the corps de logis was constrained by Vorontsov's wish to use the footings and foundations which had been built for Harrison's original design; this severely restricted the shape, size and layout of the palaces principal rooms.

These coupled with the castellated parapets add what appears to be an almost Moorish element to the late English Renaissance air of the northern façade.

However, it is the southern garden façade which displays the strongest of the building's Islamic influences; it has a flat roof and is topped by two minaret-style towers at its centre.

These minarets flank the massive, central bay, this takes the form of a projecting double height porch entered through a high Islamic horseshoe arch.

The interior of the porch takes the form of an exedra, which is really an elaborately decorated open vestibule; it has an inscribed Shahada stating "There is no God but Allah" in Arabic.

[5] The porch is flanked by two short wings, each of two bays and adorned with cast iron balconies and verandahs overlooking over the terraces and their statuary.

Abandoning completely Harrisons concept of bedrooms set in terraces beneath the corp de logis, Blore's assistant architect, Hunt, opted for the typical vast sprawling wings and servants' quarters of the 19th century English country house.

[28] These took full advantage of the gradients and topography of the site, and with their courtyards came to resemble a small medieval, fortified town of towers and high castellated walls.

Nowhere is this more evident than the Shuvalov Passage, an enclosed carriage drive squeezed between the high walls of two wings, leading from the castellated Western Gatehouse to the forecourt before the northern façade.

[29] The passage, which twists and turn beneath high wall and towers and even passes under a bridge, resembles the street of a medieval town, rather than the approach to a country house.

One of his largest projects was an extension to the palace itself, the Shuvalov wing, which was to be the summer retreat of the Vorontsov's daughter Countess Sofia Shuvalova and her children, the countess was estranged from her husband[32] This wing linked the palace to the western gatehouse, and created the enclosed Shuvalov Passage leading to the main entrance.

[34] This secondary wing is linked to the west of corps de logis by a large arcaded loggia; originally open, it is now glazed and known as the Winter Garden.

[3][10] Keebach had the park designed in such a way that it would incorporate the landscape's native vegetation, mountain springs, and nearby rocky masses,[10] in addition to foreign plant species brought in from the Mediterranean, both North and South America, as well as from East Asia.

[38] The sculptures of this Lion Terrace gained international recognition when three of them—the sleeping, waking, and half-risen lions—were featured in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925).

Through montage editing, Eisenstein arranged shots of these sculptures to create the illusion of a lion rising, symbolizing revolutionary awakening.

[10] The upper park is dominated by the mountain springs, as well as by the native southern coast forestry and clusters of foreign tree growth.

[10] The construction of Mikhail Vorontsov's summer residence in Alupka so impressed Tsar Nicholas I that he decided to have his own family retreat built at neighbouring Oreanda.

Impressed with the palace and its setting, the Prussian-born Empress commissioned from Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a Berlin-based architect, a design for a new residence.

Blore's design inspired another straightforward imitation on the eastern shore of the Black Sea: the Dadiani Palace in Zugdidi that was commissioned by the last Princess of Mingrelia in 1873 and, at the time of the Russian Revolution, was in possession of the House of Murat.

However, some 537 artistic and graphics exhibits (including temporary exhibition paintings from the State Russian Museum and the Simferopol Art Museum), 360 pieces of the building's decor, sets of unique furniture, and a series of historic books were stolen by occupying Nazi German forces,[3] amounting to a loss of 5 million roubles at the time.

[42][47] During the war, Adolf Hitler presented the palace as a reward to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who made it his personal headquarters.

Carved white lions guarded the entrance to the house, and beyond the courtyard lay a fine park with sub-tropical plants and cypresses.Following the war, the palace was used as a summer retreat for the Soviet secret police, and later as a trade sanatorium.

[9] Although Edward Blore had a state-of-the-art drainage system built into the palace's foundation, years of neglect, Coastal erosion and the construction of a nearby sewage pipe in 1974 have helped to increase the potential for a landslide.