Cabin of Peter the Great, First residential building in Saint Petersburg, Russia
The Cabin of Peter the Great is a single-storey wooden house of pine logs hewn into six facets, built in the Swedish manner and divided by an entry hall into two parts. Its walls were painted red to resemble brick, and it has large windows with small panes and a high hipped roof. The cabin is now enclosed in a red brick pavilion with a portico of sixteen arched columns.
The log cabin was built in three days in May 1703 by soldiers of the Semyonovskiy Regiment, and Peter I lived in it from 1703 to 1708 while the Peter and Paul Fortress and the new city were built. In 1723 he had it enclosed in a red brick pavilion to preserve it as a memorial; Catherine II ordered that shelter rebuilt in 1784, and Nicholas I had the present arcaded brick case built in the 1840s. A chapel of the Saviour's Image opened here in 1741–1742 and closed in 1930, the year the museum opened; it became a historical-memorial museum in 1938 and was the first Leningrad museum to reopen, in September 1944.
The cabin's design mixes a 17th-century Russian izba with Dutch Baroque, which Peter had seen in the Netherlands and later developed into Petrine Baroque. The pine logs were hewn six-sided in the Swedish manner, and a vestibule splits the interior into two halves. The doors carry ornamental metal studs unlike Russian work of the period.
The site is located on Petrovskaya Naberezhnaya and is easily accessible by foot near public transportation. Plan time to view all three rooms and be prepared for low doorways that require careful movement through the spaces.
Peter ordered the pine logs hewn into six-sided beams and painted red to imitate brick, and the high roof covered with shingles in place of tiles. A carved wooden mortar crowned the roof ridge, with decorative bombs of burning flame at its ends, marking his rank as captain of the bombardier company of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. These elements are lost, but 1720s documents already call the building the old red chambers.
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