Sarcophagus with mummy and club of intellectuals: history of Morozova’s mansion on Smolensky Boulevard

Three years ago, a large-scale restoration of the famous Margarita Morozova’s mansion on Smolensky Boulevard was completed. This October, scheduled façade restoration has also finished. Today, people can see the building the way it looked over 120 years ago.

From an estate to the Palace of Pioneers

Smolensky Boulevard as well as the neighboring street and square were named after a road that was once running there. Active development of the area began in the 18th century when nobility started settling here. Old revenue houses, estates, and mansions still frame the boulevard on both sides. Margarita Morozova’s mansion stands out due to its façade decorated with an elegant semi-rotunda.

In the early 19th century, it was an estate of the wife of major general Pavel Glazov,Moscow and Saint Petersburg head police master. A lane near Smolensky Boulevard is named after him. The main building of the estate was made of wood and covered with bricks. It had one story with a mezzanine on the wall base. The outbuildings linking the main building with its wings are made of stone. In the middle, there was a semicircular rotunda with columns and stair approaches to the front yard. Over several decades, the estate changed many owners, with each of them modifying it.

In 1879, Konstantin Popov, a wealthy tea merchant, purchased the estate. He had the main building and wings rebuilt in bricks and enlarged, with façades decorated in the Greek Revival style. Alexander Rezanov, a famous architect from Saint Petersburg, supervised the project. Back then, he was the rector of the Imperial Academy of Arts. It was not the first time when the merchant and architect cooperated. Several years earlier, Rezanov had built the Passage on Kuznetsky Most Street for Popov, where Moscow’s first telephone station was established in 1882.

Order decoration of the rebuilt veranda resembled classical Greek architecture; the house interior was a mixture of various styles and cultures: Mauritanian, Pompeian, Roman, Greek, and hunting. During the restoration in 2017–2019, specialists noted that the Vladimir Palace in Saint Petersburg was used as an example, which was built by Rezanov in 1867–1868 and became the gold standard of the Russian historism style.

The building obtained its current appearance in 1894 when it was rebuilt for its new owner,manufacturer Mikhail Morozov. Viktor Mazyrin was the architect. He was interested in the Orient, mysticism, and spiritualism and considered himself a reincarnation of an Egyptian pyramid constructor. During one of their trips to Egypt, the Morozovs bought a sarcophagus with a mummy and Mazyrin received an order to build a hall for it. The hall also had sphinx sculptures. However, the mummy did not spend long in the mansion: in 1895, it was transferred to the Rumyantsev Museum and is now exposed in the Egyptian Hall of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

The Oriental-style decorations in the living room resembled the best samples of Arabic decorative art. Morozov used the winter garden for his art collection. Among other things, it included paintings by Valentin Serov, the author of portraits of Mikhail Morozov and his son Mika.

After the owner’s death, his widow Margarita Morozova opened a club for Moscow intellectuals in this house, which was attended by composer Alexander Scriabin, opera singer Leonid Sobinov, writer Andrei Bely and others.

In 1910, Morozova sold the mansion to the Ushkovs. They owned the estate until the October Revolution. In the 1920s, the district committee of the Communist Party was accommodated here, and after a while, the mansion became home for the Palace of Pioneers branch of the Kievsky District of Moscow.

Since 2017, Margarita Morozova’s mansion houses the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies.

A new life of an old mansion

The building had not been restored since the late 1980s, when it was planned to accommodate the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR there. By the star of the work in 2017, the mansion had water leaks and stains, and peeling plaster. Some plaster mouldings were lost and marble parts of the main entrance pediment cracked.

Specialists removed old paint and plaster from the façades. On the eastern façade, console-mounted sculptures of antique figures were restored, with lost mascarons and cartouches recreated according to materials from archives on the western façade.

Granite staircases were restored, the balcony door of the western façade avant-corps was installed again to its historical place, bricked up doorways were opened, window and balcony frames were recreated. Ironmongery made to preserved original samples were installed on the door panels in historical halls.

Famous halls were also restored. In particular, the extant artistic parquet in the Greek Hall was restored, marble surfaces of fireplaces, columns, and floors in the Pompeian and Egyptian halls were cleared, while the ceiling with ornamented plaster mouldings and decorations on a golden background in the Roman Hall were recreated. The building façades were painted turquoise upon colorists’ approval.

In 2020, the Morozova’s mansion won in "For the best organization of repair and restoration work", "For high quality interior restoration", "For the best project on restoration and tailoring to modern use" categories of the Moscow Restoration 2020 contest of the best project in cultural heritage site preservation and popularization held by the Moscow Government.

Preservation of old buildings is a continuous process. That is why in 2022, scheduled restoration works were carried out in Morozova’s mansion.

“Marble columns of the portico, bars of the porch and balcony fences are over 140 years old. We used inserts of similar stone to mend significant damages of marble. The granite wall base, porch steps and platforms also had to be washed and cleared, while their lost parts were restored," said Anna Molotkova, chief architect of the project.

According to her, after the last restoration, paint had cracked and swollen on the smooth plaster surface of the façade walls and plaster mouldings. It was especially visible on the wall’s lower part over the granite wall base. That is why specialists cleared the damaged areas, filling them with a repair composition. After that, the repaired elements were repainted.

Artisans of the past could not even imagine what would happen to their works centuries later. Temperature fluctuations, biological pollutions, and noise damage structures and worsen building’s condition. That is why, experts say, cultural heritage sites require repair every two to three years, with restoration every five to seven years.

Moscow has a lot of centuries-old buildings. As part of a large-scale restoration on cultural heritage sites, over 1,900 landmarks have been restored over the last 12 years, with 500 more being still restored.