Buried St. Petersburg. Part 1

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Buried St. Petersburg. Part 2

Supplement to the fifth part of the article "How Tartaria died" - "Buried cities".

In mid-May 2015, I was sent for 5 days on another business trip to St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, this time the work schedule was very tight, so I had only one day to explore St. Petersburg. But thanks to my acquaintance with the guys from the Kramola portal, this one day turned out to be very busy, because I managed to visit where ordinary tourists are not taken, because the guys organized an excursion for me not just to Rumyantsev's mansion, but to its cellars, for which I want to express my gratitude to them once again, as well as to Andrey Bogdanov and his friend and partner Nikolay (unfortunately I don’t know the last name) - the master restorers who are now engaged in the restoration of the Rumyantsev mansion.

In the beginning, a little about the building itself, which is located at 44, English Embankment. Now this building houses a branch of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg. A detailed history of this building and its owners can be found in the article on Wikipedia. If you believe the information given in this article, then the first stone building in this place appeared in the 40s of the 18th century. After that, the building was rebuilt several times. In 1770, according to the project of the architect J.-B. Valen Delamot, in 1824 the internal premises were rebuilt, and from 1882 to 1884 another significant reconstruction was carried out under the leadership of the architect A. Stepanov, after which the facade of the building acquired its present appearance.

At the same time, it seems that the building looks quite harmonious to itself, but in fact this is achieved due to the new brick entrance vestibule, which was built by the architect A. A. Stepanov.

This is what Wikipedia says about it: “The first work that the architect does in the house is an attempt to strengthen the facade of the main building overlooking the Promenade des Anglais. His state of emergency worsened every year. The portico and the wall of the house deviated more and more from the vertical. The architect makes another attempt to "prop up" the front wall. He dismantles the existing metal canopy with a balcony and attaches in its place a massive brick vaulted vestibule - an entrance, the roof of which simultaneously served as an open balcony on the second floor. In addition, the inner transverse building of the house, which separated the first and second courtyards, was rebuilt."

The peculiarity of this vestibule-entrance is that its floor is about 70 cm lower than the floor of the old floor, therefore there is a special staircase inside for climbing to this level.

Here is another photograph of the facade of the Rumyantsev mansion from a different angle, where it can be compared with neighboring buildings.

The building on the left appears to be two-story, but in reality it is not. This is a three-story building, but the third floor is almost completely filled up and has now been turned into a basement. This is a link to the view of the building in the Yandex panorama and a screenshot from there.

And here is how the old entrance to the first floor looks from the street side of the building on the left.

What is now the main entrance to the first floor, in fact, used to be the main entrance to the second floor. The first floor of such buildings was technical, a servant lived there and various utility rooms were located, and the owners and even more so guests were practically not there, therefore, in many mansions and palaces, the main entrance was immediately made to the second floor, and the usual one led to the first floor for the servants. the door from the street, which is now embedded in the ground. It made no sense to make a similar entrance to the basement in this way, especially from the street. It was much easier and more practical to make a descent into the basement inside the building, since in this case snow in winter and water during rain will not get there. And from the point of view of architecture, no one would approve such an entrance during construction, since it goes beyond the boundaries of the land plot and forms a very decent-sized pit on the sidewalk. If the owner of the house was so impatient to make the entrance to the basement from the outside, then he would be forced to move this entrance to the back wall of the house, into the courtyard.

So initially, during the design and construction of this building, it was precisely the first floor with a separate entrance, which did not require a pit, and not a basement. At the same time, both buildings were originally built at the same time, which means that the Rumyantsev mansion, when built, had not three, as it is now, but four floors. And this is confirmed by the structure of the building, including what we later saw in the basement. This is how the courtyard of the Rumyantsev mansion looks like.

Pay attention to the round annex, inside which there is a staircase between floors. Its windows are dug into the ground, and in the central window now they have made an exit to the street. It makes no sense to design and build this element in this way at today's ground level. At the same time, under the main staircase, which I will talk about later, there is a "front" wide staircase to the basement.

This is how the windows look up close. Now imagine that winter has begun and it started snowing. If you do not clean it regularly, then in the spring, when this snow begins to melt, the window will start to get wet from melt water, and if it does not close tightly enough, then this water will run inside the room.

Another view of the courtyard. Near the window-door from which we left, in the center are the guys from the portal "Kramola", and on the left and on the right are master restorers who give us a tour (I'm filming).

On the right you can see another entrance to the "basement" from the yard. It can be clearly seen at what level the floor of the first floor once was.

I also want to pay attention to the door on the left in the previous picture. The restorers said that when work was carried out to replace engineering communications and a trench was dug in the yard for this purpose, then at a depth of about two meters, just opposite this door, granite steps of a wide staircase were discovered. That is, once this very door was another front entrance to the building, which led to the second floor, and not to the first, as it is now.

This is how the insert looks now, which divides the inner space of the courtyard. At the same time, the dimensions and location of the arch were made already at the current level of the ground, since, as follows from the quotation given above, this part of the building was thoroughly rebuilt in 1882-1884 by the architect A. A. Stepanov.

This is what the wall to the left of this arch looks like. Here the windows of the first floor, which had turned into a basement, were finally laid, except for one hatch at the end and windows in the insert.

A little later we will see exactly these laid-up windows from the basement. In this photo, note that one "window" is slightly higher and wider than the others. This is because it is not actually a window, but an arch that led to the street from the courtyard.

We go down to the basement of the building and go through the restorers' workshop, which is located in the “basement”.

Pay attention to the height of the ceilings. Moreover, this is not the full height, since the floors were poured and poured with concrete already in Soviet times, otherwise they were periodically heated when water rose in the Neva.

This is how one of the windows looks from the basement, which now overlooks the Promenade des Anglais. Once it was an ordinary high window, the lower part of which was then laid. This photo clearly shows that the floor, which is the floor of the vestibule-entrance, was cut into the old building at a new level, so the window is blocked by it. These are the consequences of the rebuilding of 1882-1884, if not even later reconstruction, since the floor is cast from concrete in place.

Go ahead and come to the arch in the right wing of the building, which I mentioned above. This is how it looks from the inside now.

The ceiling height here is a little more than 2 meters, hence the width is about 2.5 meters. At the same time, the floors are now poured, so the height was initially higher. It is possible that the width was also slightly wider, since many new brick partitions were made in the basement. But even in this form, the size of the arch is sufficient for a horse-drawn carriage or carriage to pass through it. There was no point in making such a structure in the basement. But it is quite another matter if it was the first floor and we needed to leave the courtyard.

This is how the window looks from the inside, in which a hatch with a cover is now made, which in the picture of the wall from the courtyard is visible at the far end, closer to the corner. Here, too, there was once a high window, which was later bricked up. The fact that it was precisely laid later, and not originally built this way, is evidenced by the fact that a different brick was used for the laying than during the construction of the walls. Unfortunately, in this photo it is seen poorly, while others can see it better.

This is one of the corridors we passed through. The wall on the right, built in the center of the old passage, was made later. Behind it is a large armored safe room, the walls of which are welded from metal sheets. It was also built in the process of restructuring in 1882-1884. Unfortunately, it was not possible to photograph her so that it was clear what it was. Naturally, today this level looks like an ordinary basement, where various engineering communications pass, but this was not always the case. From the story of the restorers, the floors of the first floor were initially much lower, so it was constantly damp and periodically water appeared when the level of the Neva rose. Therefore, they were constantly poured or poured with concrete. But below there is another level, as the walls go down. Moreover, these are exactly the walls, not the foundation. Something that looks like a foundation begins at a depth below two and a half meters from the current ground level, and this is actually below the usual level of the Neva in this place. This means that at the time of the construction of the first building, both the ground level and the usual level of the Neva were lower by about the same 2 plus meters.

Passing along the corridor further we run into a dead end. The passage is bricked up, while the brick is new here, not the same as at the walls. At the same time, plaster is visible on the walls, but there is no plaster on the inserts. That is, when all these bookmarks were made, it was already clear that this room would be used precisely as a technical basement, so there was no point in plastering them, but when the old walls were being built, the situation was different. On almost all old walls, either the plaster has been preserved, or its traces are clearly visible.

A few more photos of the laid passages. They show that the brick in the bookmark differs from the one from which the walls and arch vault are built. The old brick is thinner and longer than the new one and of a different shade. At the same time, traces of plaster are clearly visible on the old brick, while there is no plaster on the bricks.

During the restoration of the building, one of the old bricks was removed, which was shown to us by the master restorers. This brick differs markedly from later and even more modern ones. It is not only thinner and longer than newer bricks. This brick is more dense and durable. It was possible to break off a small piece from it with great difficulty. As the masters say, it took a lot of work to break it out of the wall, the mortar with which the bricks are connected in the masonry is very durable. It is also very difficult to break such an old brick, unlike a modern one. In terms of its strength and density, it looks more like a stone, and not like a brick.

It is also interesting that in terms of its size and texture, this brick is almost identical to the brick from which old brick temples were built in the central part of Russia, which today date back to the 12-14 century. A similar brick was used in construction until the 16th century.

The high strength of this brick means that it was made using a different technology. Firstly, I assume that this brick contains not only clay, but also some additional component, most likely of plant or biological origin, which, when mixed with clay, provides it with additional strength. Secondly, in order for the brick to be so strong, it must be fired using a special technology with very slow heating and cooling. Slow heating is necessary in order to finally remove the remaining moisture from the clay, otherwise, with rapid heating, it will boil and form steam bubbles inside the clay, which reduce the strength of the brick. And slow cooling is necessary so that during cooling, microcracks do not form in the brick, which sharply reduce its strength and make it brittle.

But my guess is that no high temperature firing was used at all in the manufacture of this brick. It hardened through a chemical process when the components were mixed. Heating, if used, is slight, mainly in order to speed up drying. It is possible that it was on the basis of this technology that methods for producing artificial minerals were developed, which were used in the construction of St. Petersburg, which we have lost today.