Description of the attraction
The village of Bolshiye Vyazemy was first mentioned in the spiritual letter of Ivan Kalita. During the time of Boris Godunov, a wooden palace with numerous outbuildings, a huge garden and a pond with a stone dam was built here. The ruined estate was in 1694. Granted by Peter I to his tutor and friend, Prince Boris Alekseevich Golitsyn (1651-1714), who was engaged in its restoration, but not very actively. The main construction on the estate began during the reign of Nikolai Mikhailovich Golitsyn (1727-1786), at the end of the 18th century: a new manor house arose a little away from the church, which during the war of 1812 received both Kutuzov and Napoleon. The history of the estate is also connected with A. S. Pushkin - his grandmother owned the estate Zakharovo, and the whole family went to church in Vyazemy for divine services.
The local legend about the owner of the estate - the old princess Golitsyna, brought out by A. S. Pushkin in the "Queen of Spades" in the form of an old woman-countess - still remains a legend, since the estate belonged not to the princess, but to her son, whom she often visited …
The estate had a unique library, collected by Boris Vladimirovich Golitsyn (1769-1813) and numbering about 30 thousand volumes. In Soviet times, it was distributed among state libraries; the family jewels of the Golitsyns also went to museums. The manor building was first occupied by a colony for homeless people, then - a sanatorium for old Bolsheviks. Before the Great Patriotic War, there was a parachute school, a tank school, and during the war - a hospital. Only in 1987. it was decided to create a museum in the estate, which is now located there.
The Transfiguration Church in Bolshiye Vyazemy was built in the 1590s. A high four-pillar five-domed temple stands on a high basement and is surrounded on three sides by open galleries with arched openings. A row of small arches adorns each drum, as well as the walls, divided into parts by small blades and narrow windows. In general, the "arched" decor is the main feature of the decoration of the temple, giving it an upward striving and surprising, with such a huge size, slenderness and stateliness. The temple is surrounded by a stone fence of the 19th century, near which, from the side of the apses, Alexander Pushkin's brother Nikolai is buried. The arched form of the fence is in perfect harmony with the decor of the church.
