Wooden Palace of Tsar Alexey: A Reconstructed Royal Residence in Moscow
Site at a Glance
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- Russia
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Russian
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page16 sections
History
The Wooden Palace of Tsar Alexey is a reconstructed Russian royal residence at Kolomenskoye in Moscow, Russia, based on the palace built between 1667 and 1672 in the traditional architecture of the Russian court. It was commissioned by Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich, whose reign brought Kolomenskoye to its greatest importance as a royal estate and court.
Royal Residences at Kolomenskoye
Earlier palaces at Kolomenskoye had been built for Grand Princes Ivan III, Vasily III, and Ivan IV. Tatar invasions and the political turmoil known as the Time of Troubles, a period of dynastic conflict, foreign intervention, and political crisis in early seventeenth-century Russia, destroyed those residences. After the crisis, Mikhail Fyodorovich, the first tsar of the Romanov dynasty, established a smaller palace complex with an entrance hall and an upper reception chamber.
After the war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ended, Alexey Mikhailovich ordered the creation of a new sovereign’s court. The complex had a fence and gates, a large wooden palace, and a stone domestic church. Construction at Kolomenskoye continued from 1667 to 1672 under the direction of Semyon Petrov and Ivan Mikhailov. Patriarch Pitirim consecrated the palace in 1672.
Construction and Court Life
The palace was connected by a passage to the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God. Its 26 interconnected terem chambers, tower-like or upper residential rooms in traditional Russian palace architecture, formed an asymmetrical wooden complex. The building served as an official royal residence and court, with separate areas for ceremony, administration, worship, study, and domestic life.
Decoration began while construction was still under way. During the winter of 1667 and throughout 1668, a team that had previously worked at New Jerusalem covered parts of the palace with woodcarving. Foreign paints and gold leaf arrived in May 1669, and interior painting began the following month under Simon Ushakov, a leading Russian icon painter, and Bogdan Saltanov, an Armenian artist summoned from Persia to work at the Russian court.
Alterations under Fyodor III
After Alexey Mikhailovich died, the palace was enlarged and partly rebuilt. In spring 1681, his son Tsar Fyodor III ordered the old dining chamber and upper reception room to be dismantled. Senka Dementyev, a peasant belonging to Boyar Pyotr Sheremetev, built their replacement. New entrance halls connected the structure with the tsar’s apartments, and beneath them stood the gilded gates known as the Front Gates.
The Streltsy uprising, involving firearm-equipped military units, led to stronger protection for the palace. Sixteen additional guard huts were built. In 1684 the towers and service buildings were repaired, the interior paintings and roof colors were renewed, and in 1685 a clock was installed in the Front Gate tower. The gate leaves were then decorated with iron and English tin.
Decline and Demolition
When the capital moved to Saint Petersburg, Kolomenskoye ceased to function as a royal residence. Repairs may have taken place during the reign of Peter I and under Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, but the palace later deteriorated and became unsafe. In 1762, Catherine II ordered architects led by Ivan Michurin to inspect the building and prepare measurements and drawings. Reconstruction was considered too expensive, and the palace was dismantled in 1768.
A model made before the demolition was preserved in the Armoury Chamber but was later lost. Acacia bushes were planted around the former palace site. During the 1770s, a new four-storey building for Catherine II was erected near the Church of the Ascension, partly with high-quality materials salvaged from the old palace. Its lower two levels were stone and its upper levels wooden. The building suffered damage during the occupation of Moscow in 1812 and was later dismantled.
Another summer palace, built in the Empire style for Alexander I in 1825, occupied the site of the previous building and again incorporated some reused materials. Alexander I did not see it during his lifetime, and it was dismantled in 1878. A surviving pavilion known as the Pavilion with Lions probably served as a manor theatre before later being used as an infirmary. Under Nicholas I, Andrei Stackenschneider designed an unbuilt palace scheme that would have incorporated the ancient Church of the Ascension into the ensemble and placed a copy of the church in the opposite wing.
Research and Reconstruction
Interest in the lost palace continued after its demolition. In the late nineteenth century, A. A. Potapov drew the Kolomenskoye palace. During the 1930s to the 1950s, the artist Dmitry Sukhov and the researcher I. V. Makovetsky attempted to reconstruct a reliable plan from surviving materials, although most of their work was lost.
An open-air museum of wooden architecture was established at Kolomenskoye in 1923. Excavations on the former palace site began in 1929 and recovered building remains, construction-material fragments, household pottery, and tiles. Research resumed in the late 1990s and partially exposed the white-stone foundations, clarifying the arrangement of the royal apartments.
The idea of recreating the palace arose in the 1990s and received support from the Moscow government. The rebuilt structure was placed in the former village of Dyakovskoye, beyond Golosov Ravine, because the original site had developed into a mature landscape of centuries-old oaks and lindens. Reconstruction took place from 2008 to 2010, using surviving plans and measurements, and the building opened in 2010. Excavations directed by archaeologist Leonid Belyaev confirmed that the foundation layout corresponded with drawings prepared in 1767 under Catherine II. The present building is a full-scale historical reconstruction, not the surviving seventeenth-century palace. Its interiors and paintings were recreated from archival materials with the aim of remaining close to the original artistic style.
Remains
The Original Palace
Layout and Construction
The original palace consisted of separate wooden chambers joined by passages and arranged asymmetrically beside a stone domestic church. It contained 26 interconnected terem chambers, while some parts of the complex rose to approximately 30 metres. The palace contained 270 rooms lit by about 3,000 windows, with a total area of 10,250 square metres excluding service facilities.
Boards covered the walls and were painted to resemble stone. Carved window surrounds and other decoration appeared in high relief and pierced carving, following an artistic scheme based on the Terem Palace in the Moscow Kremlin. The roof had a scale-like surface treated with imported colors and gold leaf. Interior walls and ceilings were covered with painted canvases laid over a primed surface.
Archaeological Foundations
Partially exposed white-stone foundations survive on the former palace site within the Kolomenskoye museum-reserve. Excavations also produced fragments of construction materials, household ceramics, and tiles. The recovered tiles provided material for reconstructing the ornamented stove in the Dining Chamber of the present palace.
The Recreated Palace
Exterior and Structural Form
The recreated palace has a footprint of more than 7,000 square metres, while its reconstructed historical interiors occupy 1,775 square metres in 23 rooms. The apartments extend across five levels and combine five buildings. Although the facades are made of logs, the load-bearing columns and floor structures are reinforced concrete concealed behind boards, so the reconstruction is not entirely wooden.
Reconstructed walls carry engravings and grass-script ornament, a decorative style using stylized plants together with animal and human figures. The interiors contain numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works of art, including authentic icons, tapestries, and household objects. The reconstructed ceremonial porch uses velvet and silk textiles, carpets, floral and bird ornament, and painted medallions.
The Ceremonial Entrance
The Red, or Ceremonial, Porch formed the principal entrance and the place from which the tsar appeared before his subjects. Its decoration included a double-headed eagle, pairs of heraldic animals, sculpted lions, forged mica lanterns, and painted double-leaf exterior doors.
Guests waited in the Front Entrance Hall before entering one of the palace chambers. From there, the ceremonial apartments followed an enfilade, a sequence of rooms aligned through connecting doorways. The Dining Chamber lay to the right, while the Council Chamber and Throne Chamber stood to the left. Their reconstructed decoration uses imitation stone, state symbols, painted door hangings, and icons including the Kazan Mother of God and the Saviour on the Veil with Angels.
The Dining, Council, and Throne Chambers
The Dining Chamber was the largest and most ceremonially decorated room. It was used for important ceremonies, receptions for foreign guests, and celebrations of church feasts. Its ornamented stove was reconstructed with authentic tiles recovered during excavation. A description from 1675 records a ceiling filled with celestial bodies, comets, fixed stars, planetary spheres, the zodiac, planetary paths, the equinoxes, and the seasonal turning points of the sun.
The Council Chamber served as a reception room. Red cloth covered its walls, with benches for boyars, members of the high-ranking hereditary Russian nobility, and a table for documents. The reconstructed room contains a copy of Alexey Mikhailovich’s Law Code and modern copies of icons, including the Archangel Michael, Emmanuel, the Archangel Gabriel, and the Transfiguration above the entrance to the Throne Chamber.
The Throne Chamber was decorated with narrative paintings of the biblical kings David and Solomon. The reconstructed ceiling illustrates the Song of Solomon, David’s Sacrifice, the Queen of Sheba Bringing Gifts, and the Union of Christ with the Church. A throne occupies the left corner, accompanied by four mechanical lion sculptures made by the craftsman Pyotr Vysotsky.
The Tsar’s and Princes’ Apartments
Alexey Mikhailovich’s room contains benches, cupboards for papers, letters, and books, the tsar’s chair, and a worktable. Its reconstructed decoration draws on works by the French painter Charles Le Brun and engravings by Dutch artists. The walls are covered with leather carrying gilded floral ornament based on seventeenth-century Western European examples.
The School Chamber contains authentic books and copies of seventeenth-century educational works, including Karion Istomin’s Primer and a Psalter with appendices, together with a grammar textbook by Meletius Smotrytsky. Fyodor’s library is presented as a collection of Russian and Western European books on history, architecture, construction, astronomy, geography, and religion. The display includes replicas of Simeon Polotsky’s Psalter and the Synopsis, or Brief Compilation from Various Chroniclers. Colored embossed leather with gilded floral ornament decorates the reconstructed walls.
The rooms associated with Peter I contain stoves faced with tiles bearing traditional relief and painting on a white ground. Their display also includes copies of soldiers’ and non-commissioned officers’ medals and books by the tsar’s contemporaries. The reconstructed apartments of Sophia Alexeyevna include a map titled Southern Part of Muscovy and books by Simeon Polotsky. Modern icon copies include Christ Pantocrator, the Mother of God Playing with the Child, Saint Leontius of Rostov, and the Saviour on the Veil.
Prayer and Upper Chambers
A circular five-step staircase-platform led to an upper chamber furnished for work and storage. Its red corner contains an icon of Nicholas the Wonderworker. The reconstructed ceremonial porch includes icons above the tsar’s chair, among them the Tenderness Mother of God, the Saviour of Good Silence, and Selected Saints Standing before the Mother of God of the Sign.
The Prayer Room was intended for morning and evening prayer. Its reconstruction drew on descriptions of rooms in the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in the Kremlin’s Terem Palace and in the estate of Prince Vasily Golitsyn. Its iconostasis, the screen separating the sanctuary from the main worship space in an Eastern Christian church, includes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century icons such as the Smolensk Mother of God and the King of Kings.
