History
In 1487, Grand Duke Ivan III commissioned two Italian Renaissance architects, Marco Ruffo and Pietro Solario to build a stone palace after a series of fires that had ravaged by then predominantly wooden Kremlin. The new palace was completed in 1492 and served as the most important venue for formal receptions of the Tsar, coronation celebrations, feasts, and state ceremonies. Tsar Ivan the Terrible celebrated his conquest of the Kazan Khanate for three days in 1552. Likewise, Tsar Peter the Great celebrated his 1709 victory over Sweden at the Battle of Poltava and the end of the Great Northern War in 1721. It was also within the Palace of Facets that the Zemsky Sobor which resulted in the Treaty of Pereyaslav uniting the Russian Empire with the Ukraine was held in 1654.
Over the centuries, the Palace of Facets suffered repeatedly from major fires damage and was rebuilt several times in its history. However, it has continued to be used for state receptions even in modern times, including the 1994 state visit of Queen Elizabeth II.
Read more about this topic: Palace Of Facets
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)