Webcam Simferopol. Catherine garden
The Central Park of Culture and Recreation in Simferopol was renamed into Catherine's Garden in July 2016 by a decision of the Simferopol City Council session, when a comprehensive reconstruction of the oldest public park area of the capital of Crimea, the first mention of which dates back to the beginning of the 19th century, began.
Garden-Park Ensemble, located in the heart of the city, on three sides bounded by Kirov Avenue, Lenin Street and Schmidt Street, and the natural boundary of the northern part of the park is the Salgir River with a landscaped embankment.
Tauride governor Andrei Borozdin in 1809 ordered to fence off the wasteland, transformed into a dump on the left bank of the Salgir, and to plant trees and shrubs on the territory cleared of garbage. To bring the idea to life prevented the Patriotic War of 1812.
The construction works were resumed in 1820. According to archive documents, at that time the "public garden in the English style" was laid out. The seedlings were supplied by Nikitsky Botanical Garden. Acacia trees, Indian chestnuts, Italian poplars, Babylonian willows and other trees and shrubs were planted along the alleys and among the conifers - Virginsky juniper, Western and giant thuja, Oriental biota, Spanish and Numidian fir.
Townspeople came to the park to walk and play croquet, listen to the orchestra on the summer theater court, and have lunch or dinner in the restaurant and cafeteria.
City Garden, or, as it was more commonly referred to, the boulevard, was so loved by Simferopol residents, that in 1876 the street, along which it was located, was named Boulevard.
By the centenary of the accession of the Crimean Khanate to the Russian Empire April 8, 1883 in the park set a monument to Catherine II. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks took away the monument for safekeeping in the storerooms of the local museum, and instead the pedestal appeared "Monument of Freedom" - a sculpture of a worker who breaks the hammer chains entangling the globe. Before the Great Patriotic War, this statue was replaced by the monument to Lenin. A year later, the figure of the leader of the proletariat was destroyed by the Nazi invaders, and the monument cast in bronze to the empress went to be melted down.
In 2016, at the initiative of the regional public organization "Russian Unity" an exact copy of the lost monument to the founder of the city of Simferopol - the Russian Empress Catherine the Great was recreated. The monument is a multifigure sculptural composition 10 meters high and weighs 7 tons. The bronze statue of the queen on a granite pedestal surrounded by immortalized in bronze and stone figures of loyal associates who implemented the joining of the Crimea to Russia in the Catherine era: Princes Vasily Dolgorukov-Krymsky and Grigory Potemkin-Tavrichesky, commander Alexander Suvorov and Jacob Bulgakov, Russian envoy to Turkey. Model of the monumental structure was created by artists Alexander Chekunov and Dmitry Startsev, based on the surviving descriptions and photographs of the monument to Catherine the Great. The authors of the reconstructed monument are Moscow sculptors Konstantin Kubyshkin and Igor Yavorsky. The main financial support was provided by the Foundation of St. Basil the Great.
