Amusement Palace (Miloslavsky Chambers) is a palace building of the Moscow Kremlin, located near the western Kremlin wall between the Commandant and Trinity towers on Palace Street. The building was built in 1651 as the residential chambers of the boyar Ilya Danilovich Miloslavsky, the father-in-law of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, is the only example of the boyar chambers preserved in the Kremlin.
The narrow section between the fortress wall and the outbuildings of the royal residence determined the planning decision of the Miloslavsky estate. The building itself is located in the center of the site, from the south and north, respectively, the front and utility yards. The building, almost square in plan, had an arched passage in the middle that connected both territories. The front porch, overlooking the southern courtyard, closed the extension, set by the verb to the main volume of the chambers.
The building was built as residential chambers of the boyar Ilya
Danilovich Miloslavsky on the territory, which since the end of the 16th
century was occupied by various outbuildings of the royal court, and was
completed by 1651. After the death of Miloslavsky, the estate in 1669
passed into the royal treasury, after which the chambers were first
connected by wooden and then stone passages to the Royal Palace. In
1672, fun began to be arranged in the chambers for the royal family -
the first theatrical performances in Rus', as a result of which the
chambers became known as the Amusing Palace. Since 1679, when members of
the royal family settled here, the palace was expanded and partially
rebuilt.
The construction of the Poteshny Palace was the next,
after the Terem Palace, the stage in the development of stone housing,
which soon became widespread in Moscow. The floor-by-floor division of
the facades with white-stone carved decor, close to the enfilade
arrangement of living quarters make it related to the Terem Palace. A
distinctive feature of the space-planning structure of the palace is the
location of the house church of the Praise of the Virgin, inscribed in
the volume of the building. It rises above the middle part of the
eastern facade. Powerful brackets, imitating machicolations, protruding
at the level of the main floor, carry the altar of the church, which
helped to avoid the non-canonical location of the altar part of the
temple above the living quarters. A flat roof with a hanging garden on
the western side served as a porch. On March 3, 1681, Tsaritsa Agafya
Grushetskaya donated 46 alams (silver, gilded plaque, forged or chased)
with a total weight of 12 pounds 83 spools from her royal fur coat to
the salary of the image of the Virgin in the Church of the Amusing
Palace.
During the reign of Peter the Great, the Police Order was
placed in the palace, and in 1806 the building was adapted for housing
and the office of the commandant of Moscow. The reconstruction of the
palace was carried out according to the project of the architect Ivan
Egotov and provided for the transformation of the eastern facade,
overlooking the newly formed Palace Street, into the main one. To this
end, the northern wing was added for symmetry, and the facade and
interiors were decorated with fashionable pseudo-Gothic details. At the
same time, the house church was abolished and the domes were removed
from it.
In 1874-1875, the architect Nikolai Shokhin made an
attempt to partially restore the ancient appearance of the building, but
this was only a stylization that reflected the architect's ideas. In
1884, the building was the commandant's house.
According to the
autobiographical story “Greetings from Werner” by Yuri Korints, in the
late 1920s, Bronislava Genrikhovna Markhlevsky, the widow of Julian
Markhlevsky, lived in the Poteshny Palace.
Currently, the
services of the Commandant's Office of the Kremlin are located in the
palace, on the initiative of which restoration work was carried out on
the monument in 2000-2004, mainly to restore individual facades of the
Church of the Praise of the Virgin and the palace, as well as some of
the interiors of the palace. One of the restoration finds was the
discovery on the architraves of the main floor of a unique white stone
carving with scenes that are rare for the scenery of the 17th century -
flowers, real and fantastic animals and birds, jousting tournaments.