Winter Palace

The Winter Palace is a palace in Saint Petersburg that served as the official residence of the House of Romanov, the emperors of Russia, from 1732 to 1917. The palace and its precincts now house the Hermitage Museum. The floor area is 233,345 square metres (it has been calculated that the palace contains 1, 886 doors, 1, 945 windows, 1, 500 rooms and 117 staircases). The total area of the Winter Palace is 14.2 hectares (approximately 1.52 million square feet). Situated between Palace Embankment and Palace Square, adjacent to the site of Peter the Great's original Winter Palace, the present and fourth Winter Palace was built and altered almost continuously between the late 1730s and 1837, when it was severely damaged by fire and immediately rebuilt. The storming of the palace in 1917, as depicted in Soviet art and in Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film October, became a symbol of the October Revolution. The emperors constructed their palaces on a monumental scale that aimed to reflect the might and power of Imperial Russia. From the palace, the tsars ruled over 22,800,000 square kilometers (8, 800, 000 sq mi) (almost 1/6 of the Earth's landmass) and 125 million subjects by the end of the 19th century. Several architects participated in designing the Winter Palace—most notably the Italian Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700–1771)—in what became known as the Elizabethan Baroque style. The green-and-w

Palace data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).