Description of the attraction
At the beginning of Nevsky Prospekt there is a huge old house No. 15, nicknamed by the Petersburgers of the 18th century "the house with columns". The history of the plot occupied by this house (now it is called "Chicherin's house") is very interesting. At the beginning of the 18th century, on the site between the present Nevsky Prospekt and Moika, there was a mud market Mytny market, where food was sold. The market burned down in a fire in 1736 and never recovered.
For almost 20 years the site remained undeveloped, and only in March 1755 the architect V. V. Rastrelli began construction of a temporary wooden Winter Palace there for the sovereign's daughter, Empress Elizabeth. The need to build a temporary palace was due to the redevelopment of the main Winter Palace. Over time, a stone opera house was added to the wooden palace. By order of Catherine II, the palace was dismantled and transported to Krasnoe Selo, and the Empress granted part of the vacated plot to the Senator, Chief of Police and General N. I. Chicherin, who by 1771 built on it a spacious house in the style of Russian classicism, with a noticeable Baroque influence - this was exactly the idea of the architect A. F. Kokorinov.
The key element of the facade of the house is the colonnades in the center and in the corners, with a composite order in the upper tier, and a Tuscan one in the lower one. The circular courtyard was built up with utility and service buildings, which were connected on both sides with the main building. Thirty-six columns that adorned the facade of the building, and gave rise to its popular name - "house with columns". The main ceremonial rooms of the house (a large two-story hall and five smaller halls, symmetrically built along Nevsky Prospect) were on the third floor. Two staircases led to the ceremonial premises: one - the corner one, to the auxiliary halls, and the other - the main one, to the concert hall.
The spacious Chicherin house, due to its advantageous location in the city center, was immediately rented by entrepreneurs and organizations. In the basement floor, as early as 1774, there was a "Free Printing House", on the ground floor there was a bookstore of the merchant Sharov and a vegetable store "Bologna" of the Italian Bertolotti. Later, they were replaced by the Amsterdam shop. The ceremonial halls of the house in 1778 were occupied by the "Club House" musical society. A little later, Chicherin's house was rented by the Burger Club.
From 1792 to 1799 the building belonged to Prince A. B. Kurakin, who attached a three-story wing with a large number of windows to it. The people immediately called Chicherin's house Kurakin's house. Until the beginning of the 19th century, the house was in the possession of the banker A. Peretz, and then - the eminent Petersburg bourgeois A. I. Kosikovsky. He also remodeled the old building, completing an extensive 4-storey building, which is closely connected with the main building. A pompous portico of 12 columns of the Ionic order, architect V. P. Stasov boldly installed it on the second floor. The famous Talion restaurant, named after its owner, was located in this house. A. S. was a regular at this restaurant. Pushkin, who mentioned him in the novel "Eugene Onegin".
In 1826, a 40x23 meter model of St. Petersburg made by Anton de Rossi was exhibited in Chicherin's house. By the middle of the century, the house housed a bookstore, a library, and A. A. Plushar, the publisher of the first in Russia "Encyclopedic Lexicon". The Noble Assembly, which also occupied part of the mansion, invited musical celebrities of that time to perform: F. List, Mauer, Serne, Rubinstein and others, even the Moscow gypsy choir came, and the Masonic lodge held its mysterious meetings in Chicherin's house.
In 2005-2010, a comprehensive reconstruction of the house was carried out. Now the building houses an elite hotel "Talion Imperial".
