Metropolitan Garden

In the nineteen nineties, weeds grew here, and the museum stored construction materials on the paths. The Metropolitan Garden existed in documents and in Rostov Veliky's memory, but the site contained only neglected grounds, an old fence, and a later pond.

In nineteen ninety-seven, Alexander Melnik, head of the museum's architecture department, prepared a project to restore the garden's late seventeenth-century appearance. His task was to distinguish historical evidence from a convenient guess. No complete plan of the garden has survived, and a mistake would have turned a museum reconstruction into a modern fantasy.

A reliable foundation came from an inventory of seventeen oh one. It gives the dimensions as fifty-five by thirty sazhen; a sazhen measured a little more than two meters. It lists apple trees, pear trees, cherry trees, and other fruit trees. The garden's name is literal as well: it was laid out under Metropolitan Jonah Sysoevich, head of the Rostov Eparchy and owner of this residence. The large staff of the metropolitan court included its own gardener.

The trees were comparatively straightforward. Restoring the paths proved harder. On an eighteenth-century plan, Melnik found one straight avenue running across the garden. He laid out the second from the lost monastic cells to the stone garden chamber. This decision was supported by a garden in the village of Demyany: at the end of the seventeenth century, it belonged to the same Rostov Metropolitan, Joasaph, and two broad avenues crossing in the shape of a cross were recorded there. Melnik did not present this analogy as a discovered plan, but considered it sufficient grounds for the project.

In nineteen ninety-nine and two thousand, the museum planted apple trees, pear trees, and cherry trees here, and laid out two cross-shaped avenues. However, the planned open-air exhibition did not materialize for another ten years. The garden was separated off by a wooden fence, visitors were not allowed inside, and materials continued to be kept on the new paths.

Only in two thousand ten did the museum open the garden for walks. Then Melnik, together with Olga Dolottseva, a member of the architecture department staff, turned to the benches. Seventeenth-century furniture from Ferapontovo served as the model, but the researchers did not copy it literally: they made the seats shorter and replaced the reversible backrest with a fixed one so that the benches would be convenient to use. The project was completed in two thousand eleven; benches made to its design were later installed in other parts of the Kremlin as well.

Today, the museum's gardeners tend the fruit trees, while shrubs in the northern part mark the outline of the vanished monastic building. The avenues follow a scholarly reconstruction of the old layout. The pond does not belong to Jonah's garden: it does not appear on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plans. Melnik determined that it probably appeared only in the twentieth century, and deliberately left it in place.