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Crimea's
castles in the air face collapse
A JEWEL of the Crimea, a palace in a foreign land that
will forever be a part of England, is slowly slipping into the Black Sea, a
victim of landslides and mismanagement of the peninsula's spectacular
coastline. Alupka, the plaything of an Anglophile Russian count that was designed by
the architect who completed Buckingham Palace, won high praise from Winston
Churchill as his base during the 1945 Yalta conference. Its battlements,
turrets, stone lions and flourishes in Tudor and British Raj-style give the palace
the feel of an eccentric English stately home. But, despite the house's monumental facade, a whole wing is in danger of
collapsing. Cracks already disfigure the library, which means that a heavy
storm, burst pipes or earth tremors could send it tumbling into the waves
below. Konstantin Kasperovich, the palace's director, said: "If the
library goes, it will ruin the whole architectural ensemble. It would be a
catastrophe." Alupka's 19th-century creator, Edward Blore, and his assistant, William
Hunt, built Count Mikhail Vorontsov an English country house. They also
included a state-of-the art drainage system. It served the palace well for
100 years but an earthquake; decades of neglect and the clumsy construction
of a sewage pipe across the estate in Soviet times have channeled a potential
landslide right through the library. Igor Smirnov, a geologist who monitors shifts in the Alupka landscape,
said: "The way they laid that pipe in 1974 was a disaster. They even
used explosives to remove large boulders." Home to 10,000 books and
manuscripts from the 18th century, the library occasionally lets out agonized
creaks as it sways with the earth's movement. Gaping cracks zigzag up and down its walls. Funds to make good damage to
the palace's structure dried up after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now,
more than £1 million is needed to finance repairs, plus an unknown amount to
build new sea defenses. Another potential landslide runs down Alupka's west side, from its
medieval-style gatehouse though its park of cypress trees and laurel hedges
towards the Black Sea. Mr. Kasperovich said: "You can see how from this
platform the fault line goes up this staircase, to the fountain and then to
the palace itself. The sea is below, water flows from above and the whole
weight of the hillside is bearing down on us." Landslides threaten the whole Crimean littoral but only Livadia, the last
Tsar's summer palace, has so far received state money to guard against the
danger. Livadia's special status as Ukraine's favorite venue for political
summits entitled it to preferential treatment, argued its director, Lyudmila
Kovaleva. She said: "This is just history. The Ukrainian government was
absolutely right to act the way it did. "You cannot give money to everyone all at once. You start with the
places that most enhance the state's prestige." Further down the coast,
the management at the Swallow's Nest restaurant, a mock-castle perched on a cliff
top, has launched an appeal to raise money to save it from disaster. A huge crack skirts its base and, after recent earthquakes in Greece and
Turkey, the staff fear the structure will not survive tremors rocking the
Crimea in the future. Within the former Soviet Union, which once sent
millions of tourists to the peninsula every year, Swallow's Nest is the
Crimea's most famous landmark. But Alupka will always hold a special place in
English hearts. Blore designed it as a fantasy on the history of British architecture,
from medieval castles and Tudor country houses to the craze for the East
manifested in the Brighton Pavilion. And yet he never visited Alupka himself.
Stalin's decision to base the British participants in the Yalta conference at
the palace was designed to flatter Churchill. The Vorontsovs were even
related to the Spencers by marriage. Count Vorontsov's memoirs record the British party's astonishment when a
casual complaint at the absence of lemon slices in their cocktails was
followed by the appearance in the hall the next day of a tree weighed down
with the fruit. Descendants of the Vorontsovs from around the world regularly visit the
palace but its parlous physical state has helped deter any claims to the
house. Mr. Kasperovich said: "We would be glad to apply the British
practice of letting family members stay in part of the house, although the
state would continue to be the property's owner." |
