Romanov Palace

The palace was built in 1891 for Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich, who had been exiled to Turkestan. The architects were V. S. Geintselman and A. L. Benois. It is a long two-storey house of grey-yellow brick, with round towers at the ends. His rooms were in the left wing and his wife’s in the right. People lived in the basement, and the large kitchen was there too: it stayed cool in the heat. The botanist I. I. Krause laid out the garden, and bronze deer stand beside the entrance stairs. The duke died in January 1918 and left the house to the city so that it would become a museum. The pictures he brought from St Petersburg were the start of the art museum in 1919; that collection later moved. From the 1940s into the 1970s the building was a pioneer palace and then a museum of antiques and jewellery. It is now the reception house of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it is not a museum you walk into. A church stood by the entrance until 1995. Opening hours and prices are left blank until someone checks them on site.