Tsarskoe Selo

Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine Palace: old woman with a child in a baby carriage

Branson DeCou’s photo series of Moscow from 1931, presented some days ago, however impressive, is not complete. After checking the complete hitherto digitized material of the University of California’s Library, we have found twice as much photos on DeCou’s Russian travel. Most of them represent Leningrad and its neighborhood, but there are some unpublished photos from Moscow as well. We will present them in the following posts.

Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine Palace, entrance gate (destroyed in WWII) and its modern reconstruction (below)

The thirty photos made of the former imperial residence in Tsarskoe Selo are particularly valuable, because exactly ten years after DeCou’s visit, on 17 September 1941 the German army invaded the palace, whose equipment they partly destroyed and partly took away. On DeCou’s pictures, however, we can see the pre-occupation conditions. It was on the basis of such photos that the reconstruction of the palaces started, right after the recapture, and as we will see, the result is really close to DeCou’s recordings.

Map of the Tsarskoe Selo palace complex. The details photographed by DeCou are:
1. Catherine Palace, 3. Cameron Gallery, 6. Grotto, 17. Alexander Palace.
Below: The map of the palace complex from 1780 by T. Miller.

The residence area was donated by Peter I on 13 June 1710 to his wife, the later Empress Catherine I, of which, as the date of foundation, they celebrated the third centenary last year, in 2010. However, the sumptuous Late Baroque Catherine Palace was built only between 1752-56 by the court architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in commission of Empress Elizabeth. The palace complex also included an extensive park with a large lake and a music pavilion on its island, several garden buildings, baths and a Chinese theater, but DeCou – at least as it is shown by the hitherto digitized material – took photos almost only in the palace. As the pictures attest, he took part in a guided visit.

Catherine Palace, interior with tour group (destroyed in WWII)

Catherine Palace, interior (destroyed in WWII)

DeCou almost certainly developed and colored his glass slides only after return home. Nevertheless he must have also made some kind of color sketch on the spot, because the colors of the slides are very similar, even in shades, to the real situation, whose photos we borrowed from here for comparison.

Catherine Palace, The Grand Hall or Ballroom (destroyed in WWII)

The Grand Hall, modern reconstruction

Catherine Palace, The Amber Room (destroyed in WWII)

The Amber Room, modern reconstruction

Catherine Palace, interior with portrait of Catherine the Great by Johann Baptist Lampi
the Elder (destroyed in WWII)

Catherine Palace, interior with portrait of Alexander I (destroyed in WWII)

Catherine Palace, courtyard (destroyed in WWII)

The courtyard, modern reconstruction

Catherine Palace, courtyard (destroyed in WWII)

The courtyard, modern reconstruction

Catherine Palace, the so-called Cameron Gallery, built in 1783-87 by the Scottish Neoclassical architect Charles Cameron in commission of Catherine II

The only photo of the garden buildings of the Catherine Palace: children swimming
in front of the grotto pavilion

Girls watching a silent film on a steampunk notebook in the park of the Catherine Palace

DeCou also made a series on the Alexander Palace. This palace was built by Catherine II, follower of Neoclassicism with Giacomo Quarengh in 1792 for his grandson, the future Czar Alexander I. In the 19th century this became the true residence for the czars instead of the Catherine Palace, including Nicholas II who lived here with his family from 1904 until their arrest in 1917. DeCou still saw intact the interiors designed in 1902 by the architect Roman Meltser, which were also destroyed in the Second World War.

Alexander Palace, exterior views and entrance

Alexander Palace, interior: the New Study

Alexander Palace, interior: working study

Alexander Palace, interior: Alexandra’s dressing room

Alexander Palace, interior: dining room

Alexander Palace, interior: imperial bedroom

Alexander Palace, interior: the Maple Room

On DeCou’s visit Tsarskoe Selo – the Czar’s Village – already bore the name Detskoe Selo, that is Children’s Village (and was named after Pushkin, as it is called today, only in 1939, at the Pushkin centenary). The name is due to the fact that a great part of the building emptied of the imperial household hosted various children’s institutions, whose inhabitants were also documented by DeCou.




The photos of Leningrad will follow in the next post.

Mañana de lunes en Farafra / Monday morning in Farafra

Al oeste desde el oasis de Farafra solo hay arena, el Gran Mar de Arena libio. Y hay que adentrarse mucho en él, sin caminos ni indicaciones, para encontrar alguna señal humana. La primera población dentro de Libia adopta la forma de un gran desafío a la naturaleza (perdido de antemano) en el oasis artificial  de Kufra, vivo gracias a los depósitos de agua fósil que han empezado a bombearse de una manera desmesurada. Los beduinos y los tuaregs llevan grabado en el alma que «La gente pasa, el desierto permanece». Farafra, en cambio, existe desde antiguo, siempre adaptándose a las condiciones precarias del oasis.

To the west of the oasis of Farafra there is only sand. The Great Sand Sea of Libya. And you have to delve very far into it, without roads or post-signs, to find some traces of human life. The first settlement in Libya is a challenge to nature, lost from the first moment. It is the artificial oasis of Kufra, which lives thanks to the fossil water deposits they are exploiting in a disproportionate way. The Bedouins and Tuaregs know well: “People go, the desert remains.” But Farafra has existed since ancient times, always adapting to the precarious conditions of the oasis.

Hoy en Farafra la vida no es cómoda. En los últimos años, la gente que visita el Desierto Blanco ha dado algún impulso a los comercios locales, la población ha crecido un poco, el lunes a las 9 de la mañana se parece bastante a un lunes a las 9 de la mañana. Farafra asiste hoy a su conversión en suburbio. Otro suburbio.

Life in Farafra is not easy today. In recent years, the people visiting the White Desert has given a boost to local business, the population has grown a bit, a Monday at 9 am looks rather like a Monday at 9 am. Farafra is gradually being converted into a suburb. Another suburb.

«Estoy convencido de que el futuro está perdido en algún lugar en los basureros del
pasado no histórico; se encuentra en los periódicos atrasados, en los vacuos
anuncios de las películas de ciencia-ficción, en el falso espejo de nuestros
sueños rechazados. El tiempo convierte las metáforas en cosas, y
las apila en cámaras frías, o las coloca en los patios de
recreo celestiales de los suburbios»

“I am convinced that the future is lost
somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical
past; it is in yesterday’s newspapers, in the jejune
advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror
of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks
them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.”

Robert Smithson, A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967)
Un recorrido por los monumentos de Passaic, Nueva Jersey, Barcelona: G. Gili, 2006, 25-26

Tengri, the blue sky

The theme of Lenin statues has already been raised several times here on the blog, for example in connection with labor movement songs, the children’s cult of dictators, or recycled pedestals, indicating that one of the many strands of Río Wang is the analysis of a youth of which these sculptures were emblematic figures.

The encounter between the rejection of the classical canon and the ingenuity of folk crafts inspired a large number of surprising statues of Lenin during the seventy years of the genre’s flourishing. However, one of the most astonishing examples is that opus which, in an ingenuous way, builds up the figure of Lenin not out of an ephemeral material, but of the endless blue of the sky and the majestic mountain ranges of the Alay, offering only the contours to it that were cut out of a rolled iron plate on a Communist Saturday.


The almost six meters high Lenin head is enthroned on the rocks of the Alay mountains, high above the little town of Aravan, just south of the Kyrgyz industrial city of Osh. Strangely enough, the blog Все памятники Ленину dedicated to all the Lenin statues of the world does not list it among the monuments of Kyrgyzstan, and there are almost no photos of it in the Internet.

The “big head” was a typical genre of the iconography of Lenin, and a very practical one at that, because, on the principle of pars pro toto and by sparing remarkably much raw material and many working hours, it indicated how gigantic we should imagine the full statue represented by its mere head. Among the many well-known examples of the genre a 14 meters and 12 tons piece stands to this day not far from here, on the main square of Ulan-Ude in Buryatia, commonly called “the head” by the inhabitants of the city.




The genre also existed in several subtypes, such as the one at the Dzhambul train station.



This, however, by trying to say too much, and putting the kitchen stool with the bust of Lenin on the top of the whole globe, in the end says too little. With half of the material they could have produced more, by carving one single head of it. More monumental is the effect of the piece in Voznesene, which built the pedestal of the head from a material that is just as non-perishable as the one used to fill the contours of the head in Kyrgyzstan:


The statue and its base were recently repainted, and thus Lenin, obeying to the spirit of the times, now is standing on the basis of the capital, without any hint to any obscure author’s name.


But let us return to the Lenin head of Kyrgyzstan, whose suprising effect, one would think, cannot be enhanced any further. But it can be. The other day we came across it in such an unusual context on which even its creators – or, to be more precise, primarily they – would have never thought.


I found the 2008 Kyrgyz feature film “Tengri, the blue sky” on the Chinese internet with the title 騰格里之愛 Ténggélí zhi ài, that is “Tengri’s love”. Tengri, the Sky Father, the chief god of nomadic Turkic peoples is another name for Allah in many modern Turkic languages, and one can only guess in what kind of relation the Hungarian word “tenger” (‘sea’) of Turkic origin stands with this name, the endless blue water with the endless blue sky.

Street name table in the Uyghur provincial capital: “Tengri Street”

The film speaks about the hopeless situation of contemporary Kyrgyz villages. Temur, the thirty years old hero returns from the desiccated lake Aral to his home village to start a new life, but the village’s conservative Islamic leaders watch him with suspicion. The young Amira is waiting in vain for her husband who went to the Afghan war as a mujaheed, while suffering from her mother-in-law’s oppression. From the situation without prospects there is only a dream-like way out: the two lovers elope from the village, and start a new, nomadic life among the ranges of the Alay. Here’s an excerpt from the movie:

And it is one of the symbolic moments of the movie that when the lovers arrive to the feet of the Alay and leave the civilization behind, the landmark is nothing else but the statue of Lenin enthroned above Aravan, composed out of the blue sky. The surreal image, the gigantic rusty figure towering beside the nomadic horsemen symbolizes at the same time the failure of the past empire and way of life, but also the fact that this empire has not disappeared without a trace. The return to nature and to the ancient roots, even if possible for the lovers in a romantic film, is no longer practicable in the reality.