Frunze Street 18, Taganrog, Regional cultural heritage site in Frunze Street, Taganrog, Russia.
Karaspasov House at 18 Frunze Street is a two-storey 19th-century mansion whose courtyard holds a detached wing where Anton Chekhov took part in amateur theatricals in the 1870s. The house is listed as a regional cultural heritage site; the wing was damaged when a construction pit collapsed in 2013 and again in 2014.
The house was built in 1818–1819, not in the 1860s. In the 1860s it belonged to the Greek merchant Mikhail Karaspasov of Nezhin; in the late 1880s it passed to the Turkish subject Panagi Constantinidi, who owned it until the 1910s and died in January 1917. Its last owner was the entrepreneur Iosif Leibovich Retsker, father of the linguist Yakov Retsker. In 1890 it was recorded as belonging to the Austrian subject Ekaterina Rafailovich and valued at 700 rubles.
The house takes its name from the Greek merchant Mikhail Karaspasov of Nezhin, who owned it in the 1860s. In the 1870s the owner's married daughter and her husband lived in a wing in the courtyard, where Anton Chekhov joined theatrical gatherings. A local saying recorded by Alexander Chekhov in 1912 had a drummer announce "the Karaspasov house is for sale".
The house stands at 18 Frunze Street, formerly Nikolayevskaya Street 20. The courtyard wing, where Chekhov acted in home theatricals in the 1870s, lies behind the main building; a deep pit from the Yevropeysky Kvartal construction opened beside it in 2004, and part of the wing's outbuilding wall collapsed into it in July 2013, with a second collapse in April 2014.
In the courtyard behind the house stands a wing where, in the 1870s, the owner's married daughter lived; Anton Chekhov visited often, and amateur theatricals were staged in an empty barn there, with the young Chekhov playing an old woman. In 2013 and again in 2014 the wall of an outbuilding attached to the wing collapsed into the pit of the neighbouring Yevropeysky Kvartal construction site.
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