Anna I, the Russian empress who ordered the creation of an ice palace and sent a couple to spend their wedding night in it

The fact that he was a Russian aristocrat and she the daughter of an Italian innkeeper did not prevent Prince Mikhail Alekseevich Golitsyn from falling passionately in love with Lucia.

And the fact that she made it a condition to become his wife that he accept Catholicism, albeit in secret, was not an obstacle either.

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But yes an unforgivable sin, in the eyes of Anna of Russiawho in 1732, when the couple arrived in Moscow, was the sovereign.

And a sin she would do her best to make them deeply regret.

Abandoning the Russian Orthodox faith was unacceptable for a man of Golitsyn’s status, especially if he had done it for love.

The tsarina suffered from bitterness, a powerful feeling sometimes more pernicious than hatred.

His kingdom is remembered as “the dark age”, one of the saddest times in Russian history.

And while experience has taught us to beware of judging women based on history written by men, the episode of her punishing Prince Golitsyn is definitely not in her favor.

the tsar’s daughter

Anna was the daughter of Ivan V or “Ivan the Ignorant” who, although he was a Tsar, actually only performed ceremonial duties while his half-brother, Peter I, better known as Peter the Great, ruled.

On the death of her father, when she was three years old, her uncle’s power was consolidated and in 1710 he arranged her marriage to Frederick III William Kettler, Duke of Courland and Semigalia, now Latvia.

Excited, she wrote to her fiancé…

Frederick III William Kettler was 18 years old when he married.

“I cannot help but assure Your Highness that nothing could delight me more than hearing your declaration of love for me.

“For my part, I assure Your Highness that I share your feelings. At our next happy meeting, which I look forward to, I will, God willing, take the opportunity to express it to you personally.”

Their wedding was luxurious and, two days later, complemented by a curious – or rather grotesque – celebration organized by Peter the Great: a marriage with bride and groom and dwarf guests.

“At the feast, the dwarfs sat at miniature tables in the center of the room, while courtiers watched them,” Lindsey Hughes recounts in “Peter the Great: A Biography.”

“They laughed out loud seeing the dwarfs, especially the older, uglier ones, whose humpbacks, huge bellies, and short, crooked legs made it difficult for them to dance, they fell down drunk or got into fights.”

The widow

During what Hughes interpreted as Peter the Great’s show of contempt for the couple and the entire Russian court, the new husband drank incessantly, and soon became hopelessly ill.

Two months later, he died, leaving Ana, as regent of a strange land at the age of 17.

Fate had great things in store for him, such as the Czar’s Bell, 6.14 meters high and 6.6 meters in diameter. (GETTY IMAGES).

She begged in hundreds of letters to find her a new suitor, but her uncle ignored her pleas because if she married again she would lose control of Courland and Semigalia.

So he reluctantly had to resign himself to his fate, not knowing that what was really in store for him was something difficult to imagine from his corner of the world.

When Peter the Great’s grandson, Peter II, died without having a single child, it was Anne who succeeded him.

Her election as empress was the result of a desperate effort to find a Romanov to occupy the throne and prevent a coup.

It was not the only option but the Supreme Privy Council of Russia, an executive body made up of wealthy families, chose it thinking it would be easy to manipulate.

they were wrong.

Although Ana signed a document with precise conditions so that power would not reside in her hands, when she arrived in Moscow she broke it, abolished the Council and reestablished the autocracy.

the ice palace

The new empress, however, had little interest in government affairs and relied heavily on her lover, Ernst Johann Biron, and a small group of German advisers to administer the state.

Replica of the Ice House of Empress Anna that began to be built annually in St. Petersburg since 2005. (GETTY IMAGES).

She, meanwhile, was mainly concerned with extravagant entertainment and crude diversions at the court of St. Petersburg, as well as financing lavish projects, from the Russian Academy of Sciences – started by Peter the Great – to the Tsar Kolokol, one of the largest bells in the world.

In the winter of 1739-1740 the empress commissioned a work of fantasy that fused magic with science: a fully furnished palace made entirely of ice, the first in known history.

The respected architect Piotr Eropkin and the scientist Georg Wolfgang Krafft used huge blocks of ice, held together with frozen water, to build “the Ice House” on the banks of the Neva River, between the Winter Palace and the Admiralty.

Behind the facade decorated with open-mouthed dolphins, there was a room with a clock, a dining room with dishes and food, a room with mattresses, blankets, pillows and curtains, all sculpted from ice and dyed with natural colors.

The perimeter was populated with ghostly figures of birds and animals, the most impressive of which was a life-size icy elephant that, according to witnesses, spouted streams of water by day and burning oil by night, and “could scream like a live elephant.” , with the sound that a man with a trumpet hidden in it produced”.

It was one Fabulous Empress Extravaganza to celebrate the recent Russian triumph over the Ottoman Empire.

And what better way to represent Russia’s “total victory over all infidels” than by combining her favorite form of entertainment – arranging and rearranging marriages – and her punishment of the converted prince.

Prince

In this 1878 painting by Valery Jacobi, the newlyweds sit on the icy bed at left; the woman dressed in gold is Empress Anna.

By then, Mikhail Alekseevich Golitsyn had not been a prince for years.

Ana I had exiled her beloved Lucia, shortly after learning of her existencehad canceled his marriage and had withdrawn his title, demanding that he be addressed only by his first name, even on official documents.

And later, not even that.

After making him her jester, she nicknamed him Kvasnik, forcing him to spend his days serving a traditional drink called kvass, as well as entertaining her and her guests, or curled up in a basket next to her desk.

But his final blow came that winter of 1740, when she came up with the idea of ​​marrying him off to one of her maidsthe hunchback Avdotya Buzheninova, who struck her as the ugliest.

On February 6, the unhappy couple – dressed in clown costumes – were blessed in a church, put in a cage and hoisted on an Asian elephant that carried them, followed by a caravan of ambassadors from all races of the Russian Empire, to the Ice House, where they would spend their wedding night.

Once there, they were forced to undress and locked in the roomafter the tsarina urged them to consummate their marriage before freezing to death.

But if what had aroused Ana’s fury against the prince and his Lucia had been for others to love each other as she never could, what she had achieved was to inspire a fairytale love story.

When Avdotya saw her new husband in mortal danger, she convinced one of the guards to give her his fur coat in exchange for the most exquisite thing she had ever owned: a pearl necklace that the empress had given her as a gift. of weddings

According to the Russo-French historian Henri Troyat, they emerged from their ice prison the next day with “nothing worse than a runny nose and some frostbite”.

Anna I, Empress of Russia, died in October of the same year.

Source: Elcomercio