Wednesday Walk. Gymnastics for the Emperor and Spring Park

The Alexandria Park in Peterhof is a quiet park for a relaxing holiday. This park was named in honour of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of Emperor Nicholas I. The park borders on the ceremonial Lower Park (the Lower Park is the park where the Great Peterhof Palace and fountains are located), but it has a completely different mood. This is a park to stroll along the paths or sit on a bench with a book in hand. The birdsong will soon distract the inattentive reader and the book will be forgotten.

I entered the park through the east gate. A small garden cottage with lion figures on the porch caught my eye. This house was built as a guardhouse and was used by the guards on duty at the entrance to Peterhof. Later the building was partially rebuilt and became a summer flat for the court physician. Now the excursions department works here.

A rather large yellow-coloured two-storey house, with openwork canopies over the front doors and fancy interlacing window frames, was a little further away. This building was intended for the accommodation of servants. Several small cottages were built along the eastern boundary of the park, where the imperial family's cronies, confidants and staff lived in the summer. In the early 19th century, the Romantic park style became popular, light and slightly careless - to the casual visitor it would appear that the cottages were built independently of each other. But each of these buildings blended perfectly into the park's landscape. Most of Alexandria's buildings are in the neo-Gothic style.

I turned a little to the side because I noticed strange geometric shapes in the neighbouring plot. These objects looked like tree trunks from afar, but in the spring park they stood out with their rich green colour.

Emperor Nicholas I ordered the construction of a complex for gymnastic games in the spring of 1834. Similar complexes were located in other imperial residences and were intended primarily for the emperor's sons.

All gymnastic equipment was made according to the drawings of the gymnastics teacher L. Linden. A roundabout, gymnastic bars, gymnastic rings, a tourniquet, a spiral staircase and a spiral running track were built. The old imperial gymnastics equipment had long since fallen into disrepair, but was restored according to surviving drawings during restoration work in the 2010s.

Several cottages located next to each other are a kitchen complex. In addition to the kitchen itself, it includes several outbuildings - a large pantry, an icehouse, a laundry and so on. The house of the Federal Courier Service, the house of Peterhof's chief fountainkeeper and the Admiral's House are located in a separate building.

The miniature Admiral's House is essentially a guardhouse near the eastern gate leading into the park from the Lower Road. In the 1830s, architect Shtakenshneider converted this small building into a summer house for the second son of Emperor Nicholas I. Admiral General Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich stayed in this house when he came to visit his brother, and the house became known as Konstantinovsky or Admiralsky.

The single storey red brick cottage on the bay is an old sea guardhouse. It is one of the later buildings of Alexandria Park, it was built in 1895 in the Pseudo-Gothic style. This guardhouse was built in place of an older, wooden one. Interestingly, until recently, this cottage retained its utilitarian purpose, as it was a station of the Water Rescue Society. I am not sure that anyone would dare to swim in this part of the Gulf of Finland nowadays, it is very shallow and the shore is swampy and overgrown with coastal grass. Although in hot summer weather the desire to take a dip in the cool waters of the bay may be too strong to pay attention to such obstacles.

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Smartphone	Google Pixel 3a
Location	Saint Petersburg, Russia

This is my entry for the #WednesdayWalk challenge by @tattoodjay.