Our museum happily announces the completion of restoration work on the 19th-century Pensioners’ Stable pavilion and the adjacent cemetery for over 120 horses of the Russian emperors in the Alexander Park of Tsarskoe Selo. The site is already available to visitors, but a permanent display in the building is planned to open in spring 2026. The permanent display dedicated to imperial horses will include a decorative harness for Tsesarevich Alexei’s favourite donkey, presented by King Victor Emmanuel III to Emperor Nicholas II during the latter’s visit to Italy in October 1909.
The restoration began in 2019 and was financed by the museum. Restored are:
- The site's general layout;
- The exterior of the building, as well as the interior utilities and carpentry;
- The bases for the grave slabs, the latter reinstalled to their original places;
- The lost grave slabs, reconstructed with the buried horses' names established from archival data.
The Pensioner’s Stable was built in 1827-29 to the design of the architect and landscape designer Adam Menelaws (1753-1831), to serve as a "retirement home" for horses that had left the service of their imperial masters "due to old age and debility".
Horses of the emperors of the nineteenth century are buried in the adjacent cemetery, including animals from the stables of Emperors Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III and Nicholas II. The first burial in the Horse Cemetery dates back to 1834, the last to 1915.
Alexander I's horses buried in the cemetery: the horse Lamy, the black gelding Pochtenny (respectable), the bay gelding Segai, and the chestnut gelding Orlov.
Nicholas I's horses buried in the cemetery: the mare Milaya (sweet), the black mare Nadezhda (hope), the dark bay gelding Homer, the gray mare Chara, and many others.
Some of the last horses buried in the cemetery include Alexander III's mare Kob, and the 1877-born gray gelding Serko or Sery (gray), presented to Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich (later Nicholas II) in 1890 by Dmitry Peshkov, a Russian army officer who rode Serko for 8,836 km (5,491 miles) from Blagoveshchensk on the Amur River in the Far East to St Petersburg.
The Pensioners' Stable was only slightly damaged during the Nazi occupation of Tsarskoe Selo in 1941-44, but the building and the cemetery later fell into neglect and disrepair. Some of the grave slabs were restored in the early 2000s with the financial support of the French writer and horse specialist Jean-Louis Gouraud. An extensive restoration was started and financed by our museum in 2019, with a two-year interruption during the COVID pandemic.
