Hello everyone! Happy Wednesday to you!! How are you and how are things going?? As usual, I do wish you the best!! It's the middle of the week, and here I am, writing this post!! I hope you're having a good day, as for me, guess the day is being as good as it can be, in spite of my mind, I try to celebrate every little blessing and hold on to them for as far as possible. Is it hard? Sometimes it's impossible, but I do try, and there's nothing better to do, really. Anyway, I have a story to share with you all today!!
As I told you guys, history is something I like a lot, specially the history of amazing personalities such as Catherine II of Russia. As a lot of people, I can get bored by the techinical details. I do like statistics and all that, and I don't mind dates, but when you read something dry and boring, no one can really stand it, not even those who like history, in fact, my favorite part of history are precisely the small stories and the fun facts, and the quicky details, this is one of them, the one I'm about to share, it's not a funny story, it's actually quite a tragic event, but it's also filled with adventure and makes us wonder about it. So here we go.
THE HOUSE THAT FELL DOWN.
In May 1748, once upon a time, a heck of a time ago, the empress Elizabeth of Russia and her courtiers were visiting the lands of her lover, prince Razumovsky. Between the visitors, were Catherine and her husband, Peter. There, they and their entourage were acomodated in a small wooden house that was recently built, right above a hill. They stayed in the third floor apartment, that had three rooms. They would sleep in one room, Peter used the other as a closet, and the lady in waiting of the couple, Madame Krause, would sleep in the last one. Right below them, the supervisors of the couple, the Choglokov couple, and the other members of the group, would sleep.
In the first night there, they throw a huge celebration, that lasted until 6PM. After that, they went to sleep, BUT...
At 8AM, or so, one of the guards heard a bad noise. He followed the sound and went to check the foundations of the house they were staying, only to find out not only the bad noises were coming from there, but also the foundation was collapsing under the moist ground, and the house was starting to fall over the hill.
A disaster was about to strike, he rushed to tell Monsieur Choglokov, the most important person there, that the house was going down. In panick, Choglokov quickly rushed to the third floor and shouted to Catherine and Peter "GET UP AND LEAVE THIS PLACE AS QUICK AS POSSIBLE! THE FOUNDATION OF THE HOUSE IS COLLAPSING!"
Peter woke up immediately and did just that, he ran away to save his life.
Catherine got up too and said she would go out in a minute. So she quickly went to go put something above her sleeping clothes, when she remembered no one told Madame Krause, the lady in waiting on the floor, about the event, and she was still sleeping. So she went to warn her about the chaos, who was getting more and more serious by the second! As she was warning Krause, the tables of the floor started to move like waves in the ocean and the whole place started to sink into the land, falling, stretching and disintegrating! Soon, they fell down on the floor and would've not been able to escape have not a sergeant rushed in into the place and rescued them.
He carried Catherine to the stairs, but they were already destroyed, so he had to pass her to the closest person, and so on, until she could finally leave the house. Madame Krause was saved in the same way.
Outside, they found the confused survivors of the mayhem. Catherine herself survived with wounds, and she was in a huge state of shock, but she was actually lucky to be warned about the disaster, some servants couldn't be warned about what was going on, and they were still sleeping when they were smashed by the falling house, which is an awful way to die indeed. And even worse, as the house feel on the hill, it killed more 16 people that were sleeping next to it.
This was a huge disaster for the people involved, and why it happened in the first place? Why, because the house was quickly and carelessly built on the winter, and the land was frozen, as the winter is really harsh on Russia. But when the spring came over and the heat came with it, the ground got moisty and the foundation of the house started to collapse.
Razumovsky, the host of the group, was devastated to hear what happened, he was profoundly in shock to hear the damage that his house caused on the people. He was absolutely in despair and even talked about killing himself. He drinked heavily trying to cope with the situation. Her lover, empress Elizabeth, was terribly affected by the depression of her beloved man, and she cried a lot.
Because of the gravity of the events, Elizabeth tried to deny what truly happened and decided that this was nothing but a minor setback. People around her pretended the risk was minimal, in order to please that very moody person, and only Catherine couldn't hide her fear and shock, something that made Elizabeth really angry.
And the falling house is the story I have to share with you guys today! What a terrible tragedy the one that happened. In order to tell you guys of the event, I counted with the help of the Biography of Catherine, by the amazing Robert K. Massie! It's a wonderful book!!! The biography is filled with stories like this, and they're extremely interesting and intriguing! Catherine indeed had a very agitated life, and believe it or not, this was only a minor incident in comparison to other stuff she had to face! This post is getting quite long so I'll just close the post sharing the book and also a portrait of young Catherine.
This book is truly amazing!!!!!!
 |
| This is young Catherine, this is how she'd look like when this event took place, and this painting is by Louis Caravaque (1684-1754) |
And this is it for today! Sorry guys, I got way too excited to share this story with you guys! Hope I didn't annoy you all, you're the very best!! See you guys next time!
Comments
Post a Comment