Secret Garden in St. Petersburg

Among the concrete jungle of St. Petersburg, behind the facade of one of the houses on Liteiny Prospect, a real natural oasis was hidden - a green garden with a fountain. True, the years and the disregard of the regimes and living citizens have done their job, once a wondrous garden grew into an entourage scenery for anti-utopian films.

Divided into three parts, the arch of the main entrance of the house on Liteiny Prospekt not only recalls the bygone days of Santa Barbara, but also serves as a portal to another world, which the underground avant-garde artists, writers, poets and musicians used to enjoy. Opening the doors of a massive lattice, closely echoing the entrance of the public with the fence of the summer garden, they found themselves in a mysterious courtyard, which did not reach the noise of Liteiny Prospect, inside it seemed that you were in a completely different city, in another country, and only meowing in Leningrad the language of cats brings you back to reality.

Earlier, when the grass was greener and taller, when the trees were beautiful, and people didn’t know about the existence of genetically modified products, didn’t know about the existence of PPs and took selfies with the help of familiar artists, the state adviser Von Cruz, who acquired a slightly different house, started a global restructuring in it .

As an experienced car dealership, he began pre-sales training for his property. It was he who, as tuners changing the grille, slapped the front three-arch entrance, and between the two new buildings, in the form of a salon air freshener, the garden I described appeared.

Willows grew in it, and this gave an additional reason to play with stucco, so, on the tiles decorating the entrance to the courtyard, stylized willow leaves appeared. Well, with the mania of a fan of stickers on the windshield, wise phrases in Latin formed on the facade. The first: Domus propria domus optima, which means "your home is the best," and the second Dies diem docet, that is, "day teaches day."

As a result, the garden surrounded by the walls of the house, hidden from the eyes of casual passers-by, became an ideal stage for many artists. Here Chaliapin sang, Akhmatova performed, came in with a Grebenshchikov guitar, read Brodsky's works, and Saigon children also pulled up here. In those years, a fountain was still working in the center, so there was a lot of water and cheap port, which poured into glasses of underground artists.

Until now, only one question remains a mystery: "Who gave him such a mysterious name?" "Who has not heard of the Count of Saint Germain?" asked Pushkin once.

Perhaps it was this creation that formed the basis of the cult of creative personalities, and this mysterious nickname came from here. Although some contemporaries tell stories that someone called it the "Palais Royal". But I think that it was the figure of one of the most mysterious people in the history of France that was accepted by the educated people for a suitable secret nickname.

Today the garden is in very poor condition. The fountain, on the site of which they tried to make a flowerbed, has not been working for a long time. The decoration of the courtyard facades collapsed, and only the poles with half-erased letters "San Galli" remained from the lanterns. Everything was overgrown with weeds, the courtyard was closed to the intercom, and tenants looked suspiciously at tourists trying to get inside.