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Fire at the Winter Palace (1837)
On 17 December 1837, a fire broke out at the Winter Palace due to a faulty chimney between the gallery and the wooden vault of the Hall of Peter the Great. The blaze raged for over thirty hours on the second and third floors of the palace.
Despite the personal heroism of the firemen, the guards regiments and Tsar Nicholas I, the imperial residence was gutted, causing great material and cultural damage. As Vasily Zhukovsky wrote: “From the historical point of view, the Winter Palace meant the same to our modern history as the Kremlin did to our old history.”
The damaged interiors were restored by Vasily Stasov, Konstantin Thon, Auguste de Montferrand, Alexander Brullov, Pyotr Basin, Alexander Terebenyov and Andreas Roller between 1838 and 1841 and the Winter Palace was reconsecrated in 1839.
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