It was also during Nicholas I's Crimean tour of 1837 that the first
Romanov palace on the coast was planned. Despite its low position close to the shore, overshadowed by trees and tall cliffs, the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna had taken such a liking to Oreanda that her husband decided to give it to her, and the Berlin architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel was commissioned the following year to produce a design for a residence. In the end it was the leading St Petersburg architect Andrei Stakenschneider who took over the project, with William Hunt supervising the stonemasonry. The sumptuous neo-Greek palace and its landscaped English park (filled with specially imported stags and roebucks)15 were completed in 1852 and the imperial family arrived that autumn for an extended stay.16 It was to be Nicholas I's only visit to Oreanda. The Crimean War temporarily put a stop to recreational travel in the area, and after the Tsar himself died in February 1855, his widow felt little desire to return. Alexandra Fyodorovna in fact decided she would rather go to Nee, and the Oreanda palace received its first regular visitors only after her death in 1860 when it was bequeathed to her second son, Grand Duke Konstantin.
Oreanda became a beloved holiday destination for the members of his family and their entourage, but nothing remains today of the palace: it burned down not long after Konstantin's older brother, Alexander II, was assassinated in 1881. What stands in its stead is the small church the devout Grand Duke built in memory of his mother when it became clear that the costs of reconstructing the palace would be prohibitive. Grand Duke Konstantin was a man with refined artistic tastes, and he took the unusual step (for a Russian Orthodox Christian at any rate) of de' ding to build his church in the Georgian Byzantine style. He felt this was the most suitable style for all small churches in that part of the world, smce they were the first to be built in the southern Crimea since the original Greek churches of the early Byzantine period. For the interiors, Konstantin commissioned exquisite mosaic icons from Antonio Salviati, who was famous for reviving the Venetian glass industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. After sending the first couple of icons to Oreanda, the 74-year-old master even travelled himself to the Crimea in May 1886 to discuss the rest of the church's decoration with the Grand Duke.
Chekhov loved visiting Oreanda when he lived in Yalta. The park was open to the public and was an extremely popular destination with the locals: the Yalta branch of the Crimean Mountain Club organized twice-weekly trips in its charabancs. Chekhov came here particularly often during his first winter in Yalta, usually in the company of a young lady called Nadezhda Ternovskaya, which set tongues in Yalta wagging. Her father was the priest at the Church of St John Chrysostom, and several people hoped a betrothal would follow. After a short carriage- ride to the church, the two would sit on a bench mst below it from where they could look down at the sea and admire the unparalleled view of the bay of Yalta. The 'Chekhov Bench', as it is now known, was, of course, the setting for a famous passage in the celebrated story "he Lady with the Little Dog', in which Gurov and Anna take a dawn trip up the coast to Oreanda at the beginning their summer romance:
They sat on a bench not far from the church at Oreanda, looking down at the sea and saying noth'ng. Yalta was barely visible through the morrvng mst, and white clouds stood motionless on the tops of the mountains. The leaves on the trees с .d not sur, the < cadas were chattering, and the monotonous, muffled noise of the sea convng up from down below spoke of rest and of the eternal sleep which aw; ts us. It had made that ncise down below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda existed, it was making that noise now and would continue to make that noise in that same hushed and indifferent way when we are no longer here. And in that permanence in that complete indifference to the life and death of each one of us, ,s perhaps concealed a guarantee of our eternal salvation, a guarantee of the endless movement of life on earth and endless nerfection. S ..ting tranquilly next to a young woman who seemed so beautiful in the dawn light, entranced by this magical setting - che sea, the mountains, the clouds, the vast sky, Gurov was thinking that when you really reflect on it, everything is beautiful on this earth, everything that is, except wnat we think and do, when we forget about the higher purpose of e>, stence and about our human dignity.
A person - most likely a night watchman - came up to them, peered at them and then went away. Even that detail seemed mysterious and beautiful too. You could see the steamer from Feodosia arriving, lit up by the dawn and already w hout ligh ts.
'There is dew on the grass' said Anna Sergeyevna, breaking the silence.
'Yes. Time to go back.'
They returned to town.17
Chekhov must have sat on that bench at daybreak too, and when he wrote these lines he may have been thinking about a letter his friend Levitan had sent him back in 1886 from Yalta. Levitan had written to Chekhov to tell him about the day he had climbed a cliff to look down at the sea, describing the eternal beauty of the scene, and how insignificant the majestic Crimean landscape made him feel.18 Levitan was by that time even more gravely ill than Chekhov, and in July 1900, at the age of forty, he died, having paid a final visit to the G imea to see his friend in December the previous year, the month in which 'The Lady with the Little Dog' was pub'ished. The watchman menuoned in Chekhov's story was most likely modelled on the ex-Crimean War serv ceman who had been fx-st employed by Grand Duke Konstantm to guard the church.19
The view from the bench by the church at Oreanda
Of the two other imperial properties situated in the environs of Yalta, it was Llvadia which provided the stimulus for the town'sdevelopment as a first-class resort, and thus directly impinged on Chekhov's decision to take up residence in 1898. Because it was actively used as an imperial residence at that time, it was not as accessible to the public as the other palaces and Chekhov visited only on rare occasions. The beautiful estate of Livadia (from the Greek word for 'meadow') stood next door to Oreanda, but without ts precipitous cliffs. It was just a few miles up the coast from Yalta and conveniently came up for sale in 1860. The Empress Maria Alexandravna suffered from tuberculosis, and Alexander II had been hoping to find a suitable dacha in the southern Crimea where his wife could recuperate from the ravages of dank St Petersburg winters and the strain of giving birth to eight children in quick succession. The spacious grounds of Livadia had already been extensively landscaped by Joachim Tascher (a relative of Napoleon's wife Josephine, who had turned his back on his aristocratic backgiound to pursue a career in, gardening), and Maria Alexancirovna immediately fell in love with the place when the imperial retinue made their first visit in 1861. The author of Murray's Handbook to Russia also went into raptures when visiting the estate a few years later:
The natural beauty of this retreat and the taste with which it is fitted up cannot be surpassed. On the terrace in front of the palace is a fountain, surrounded by the most exquisite flowers. From the pavilion which stands on a rock at the edge of the garden a most splendid view of Oreanda and Yalta is obtained, and nothing can be more beautiful or impressive than a sunset over the blue waters of the Euxine seen from this fairy spot.20
It became immediately clear, however, that the existing house and its adjoining buildings needed extensive remodelling and expansion, and while this work was being carried out by the court architect, the imperial family took their holidays in Nice. It was in Nice in 1865 that Nicholas, the heir to the throne, died from tuberculosis, and it would be tuberculosis which would later kill his mother. It was just at this time that the imperial physician Sergei Botkin became aware of the excellent climatic conditions in the southern Crimea and strongly advised Maria Alexandrovna to spend the autumn in Livadia. Botkin's advice was soon followed by hundreds of other consumptives, many of them (like Chekhov) doctors themselves, who started coming to Yalta in ever greater numbers in the hope of making a recovery. The connection of Sevastopol to central Russia by nil in 1873 also played a role in attracting invalids from the north, and by the time Chekhov first passed through Yalta in 1888, there were already so many tuberculosis sufferers living in the town that they were as distinctive a feature as the hoiidaymakers.