Vorontsov Palace, Alupka
Interesting facts
- According to a well-known story, Churchill was so taken with the marble lions that he asked Stalin if he could take them home, and Stalin refused.
- In Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein cut together shots of the sleeping, waking and rising lions so that a single stone lion seems to leap up.
- Edward Blore, who designed the palace without ever visiting Alupka, is best known in Britain for completing Buckingham Palace.
- The first scheme was a plain classical villa by Thomas Harrison of Chester; its only feature to survive was the great seaward niche, recast as an Islamic portal.
- Blore had to reuse the foundations already laid for the earlier classical design, which fixed the size and layout of the main rooms.
- The chimney stacks on the English-looking north front are shaped like minarets, so the two styles can be seen side by side.
- The western gatehouse, with its round towers and machicolations, was redrawn by William Hunt almost as a copy of Bodiam Castle in Sussex.
- The library was modelled on Sir Walter Scott's own library at Abbotsford; the prince was an admirer and friend of the novelist.
- Thousands of the prince's serfs were brought from the Moscow, Vladimir and Voronezh provinces to build the palace, working almost entirely by hand.
- Buying the land from local Tatars obliged Vorontsov to build them a new mosque as part of the deal.
Why it is worth it
The Vorontsov Palace looks like two buildings joined back to back. Seen from the mountain side, it reads as an English country house in the Tudor manner; seen from the sea, it turns into a fantasy of the Islamic world, with a great arched portal modelled on the Jama Masjid in Delhi and an Arabic inscription of the Shahada running above it. The palace stands at Alupka, on the southern coast of Crimea, and was built between 1828 and 1848 for Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia, at a cost of some nine million roubles.
The designer was the English architect Edward Blore, assisted by William Hunt; Blore himself never came to Alupka. The walls are of a local greenish-grey diabase quarried locally, chosen so that the building would blend into the rocky slope. On the south side a broad stair descends towards the sea, guarded by three pairs of white marble lions carved by the Italian sculptor Giovanni Bonanni, the lowest pair asleep, the middle pair waking and the highest standing upright; the lions appear in Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin of 1925. Around the house the German gardener Carl Kebach laid out a park of about 40 hectares with some 200 species of exotic trees and shrubs: the upper park keeps the native coastal woodland and mountain springs, while the lower park follows the model of an Italian Renaissance garden.
The palace became a museum in 1921. During the Yalta Conference of February 1945 Winston Churchill and part of the British delegation stayed here. Inside, the palace has some 150 rooms with parquet floors and period furnishings; a large arcaded loggia linking the main block to a side wing, once open, has been glazed and is now known as the Winter Garden.
Getting there
The palace is in the town of Alupka, about 13 km southwest of Yalta along the coast road. The main airport of Crimea is at Simferopol (SIP), about 70 km to the north in a straight line, across the Crimean Mountains.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Swallow's Nest 5.9 km · castle
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From the encyclopaedia
The Vorontsov Palace or the Alupka Palace is a historic palace situated at the foot of the Crimean Mountains near the town of Alupka in Crimea. The Vorontsov Palace is one of the oldest and largest palaces in Crimea, and has been one of the most popular tourist attractions on Crimea's southern coast.
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