Description of the attraction
The stone staircase is one of the attractions of the city of Taganrog, it connects Grecheskaya Street with the Pushkinskaya embankment of the city. The staircase was built at the expense of a wealthy Greek philanthropist - merchant Gerasim Fedorovich Depaldo, according to his spiritual testament of December 1822, which read: "Build a descent to the stock exchange between the houses of the court adviser Kovalinsky and Greek Christo, for which to allocate 15 thousand rubles."
The idea for the construction of the staircase was submitted by Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Ivanovich Makedonsky, a Taganrog architect of the early 19th century, the architect is considered the author of the project, Franz Boffo, and the engineer Anisimov supervised the construction work. So, by September 1823, the Stone Staircase was ready.
The steps and curb slabs were made of local Sarmatian limestone, they descended in the direction of the bay for 113 meters, separated by thirteen wide platforms with a total width of steps from 5.4 meters to 7 meters below. Thus, when viewed from the top step, all the stairs appeared to be the same width, and when viewed from below, a clear perspective was visible. Later, this technique was used in the construction of the Potemkin Stairs in Odessa. For a long time, the staircase was popularly referred to as Depaldovskaya.
During the Crimean War in 1855, a detachment of British sailors tried to climb the stairs to the city, the Cossack hundred, led by the centurion Yermolov, stopped the British with weapons fire.
Each of the sites offers an amazing view of the bay, of the ships standing in the roadstead and entering the harbor. This majestic panorama left a big mark on the life and work of famous residents of Taganrog and guests of the city: the writer A. P. Chekhov, the poet N. F. Shcherbina, the Moscow Art Theater artist A. L. Vishnevsky, the artist Sinodi-Popov, who was the first of the masters to depict the Stone Staircase.
In the fall of 1879, the staircase was greened for the first time. And in 1934, its major reconstruction began. Then it was planned to install up to three dozen copies of antique sculptures, such as "A boy taking out a splinter", "Boy with a goose", "Aphrodite of Capuansky" and others. The reconstruction was completed by the May 1, 1935 holiday, after completing the main work, at the same time 30 Roman and Greek vases and 8 sculptures were installed, lighting was equipped with lamps and spotlights, and a small park was located below, where a stormy trade in soft drinks and ice cream took place. The staircase has become a favorite resting place for townspeople and tourists.
True, it was not without oversights: apparently, without getting acquainted in detail with the initial project, the builders narrowed the staircase to 5 - 5, 4 meters along the entire descent, which violated the original principle of spatial perspective. The upper and lower stairs now have the same width, in contrast to the correctly designed earlier with a significant calculated difference in their width.
In 1945, an octagonal pedestal with a sundial was erected at the top of the stairs.
Now the staircase consists of 14 marches and 188 steps, the number of steps in the march is different - from 4 to 19. The famous Taganrog children's writer ID Vasilenko dedicated one of his stories to the Stone Staircase and the Sundial. Since 2003, on the City Day in Taganrog, an annual race on the Stone Stairs has been held.
In 2006, the limestone steps were replaced by granite ones, which will undoubtedly continue the life of this wonderful creation, although it changed its historical flavor. In 2012, the Stone Staircase was included in the regional stage of the All-Russian competition "Miracle of Russia 2012".
