10 Facts About Mikhaylovsky Castle

Saint Michael's Castle, called the Mikhailovsky Castle or the Engineers' Castle, is a former royal residence in the historic centre of Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Saint Michael's Mikhaylovsky Castle was built to the south of the Summer Garden and replaced the small wooden palace of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.

Mikhaylovsky Castle was murdered on 12 March 1801, in his own bedroom, by a group of dismissed officers headed by General Bennigsen.

Mikhaylovsky Castle was succeeded by his son, Emperor Alexander I, who was actually in the palace at the time and was informed of his accession by General Nicholas Zubov, one of the assassins.

Mikhaylovsky Castle is oriented as a square with rounded corners, inside the square, there is an octagonal inner courtyard.

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The appearance of Saint Michael's Mikhaylovsky Castle combined Romantic sentiments and Maltese symbolism.

Spectacular octagonal courtyard of Saint Michael's Mikhaylovsky Castle has prototypes not only in the classical architecture of Italy, it goes back to the octagonal early Christian baptisteries.

Statues in the niches of the southern facade of Saint Michael's Mikhaylovsky Castle are personifications, symbolic of the virtues of the ideal monarch.

The classicist elements, together with Romantic ones, make up a peculiar "costumed architecture" in Saint Michael's Mikhaylovsky Castle, which anticipates the Empire style of the early nineteenth century.

Sometimes the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is called pre-Romanticism in Russian art history, but in this case, it would be more accurate to say that the unique appearance of the Saint Michael's Mikhaylovsky Castle represents not only pre-Romantic or Romantic architecture but is above all an architectural portrait of the Emperor himself.