Mariinsky Palace

Empress Elizabeth commissioned Bartolomeo Rastrelli to design a Baroque palace in Kyiv in 1747, then dedicated her remaining years to not visiting it. Construction finished in 1752. The first royal to actually sleep there was Catherine the Great, who arrived in 1787, thirty-five years after completion, during a tour of her southern territories that was more spectacle than inspection.

The building’s subsequent history reads as a study in expensive persistence. A fire in 1819 destroyed the wooden second floor and left the palace abandoned for fifty years. Reconstruction finished in 1870, and the palace was renamed for Empress Maria Alexandrovna, the wife of Alexander II. A German bomb gutted it again in World War II. Rebuilt by 1949. At no point did anyone seriously consider stopping.

Nothing original from Rastrelli’s design survives. The proportions remain, the Baroque silhouette remains, the pale blue facade looks much as it did in the eighteenth century paintings. But the substance has been replaced so many times that the palace is less a building than a persistent intention: the idea of a palace, reconstructed to specification after each catastrophe. It now serves as Ukraine’s presidential ceremonial residence, which means a structure that no empress ever bothered to visit, built for a court that no longer exists, in a country that did not exist when the first stone was laid, continues, against considerable odds, to function.