The palace and manor were built on the banks of the Uperta River (a tributary of the Upa) instead of the dilapidated wooden Streletskaya fortress, from the foundation of which in 1663 it is considered to be the history of Bogoroditsk.
The description of the coat of arms of Bogoroditsk says: "In a silver field, nine branches of grass called Bogoroditskaya are scattered to indicate the name of this city. "
The symbolism of the coat of arms is explained simply. The entire hill on which the fortress stood, and then on which the palace was erected, was dotted with grass, which was then called Bogoroditskaya, and now they call it thyme or thyme, and which is brewed with tea or added as a seasoning to meat or fish. At that time, icon painters used this herb to make blue paint, which was used to paint the shroud of the Blessed Virgin Mary on icons. Hence the name of the city – Bogoroditsk.
A landscape park with ponds and grottoes was built around the palace, which was not inferior to the park ensembles of Europe, made according to their best models, but with its own Russian flavor. Andrey Bolotov, the estate's manager, has been creating this park masterpiece for twenty years, without spending a penny of government money on it.
A.T. Bolotov wrote with pride: "The foreign travelers themselves admitted that they had never seen anything like it."
There is a legend that the city of Bogoroditsk owes its layout to Catherine the Great, who, while in a palace under construction, dropped a fan and ordered the city to be arranged in this way.
But the documents point to the authorship of the estate's manager, Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov. He came up with a very interesting solution. From a semicircular projection on the facade of the palace facing the Big Pond, he seemed to have drawn five rays, which formed the basis of the urban layout. Five streets, continuing these rays, fan out, rising along the gentle slope of the shore opposite the palace and giving a peculiar panorama of the city. With this layout, Bolotov connected the palace with the city.
There is a stone lying on one of the alleys near the pond. Young couples come to him to touch or just sit on him. This stone is called the "Stone of Love". If you touch it, love will live until the end of days. There is an assumption that the history of the stone began with secret meetings of Catherine's illegitimate son, Count Bobrinsky, who was in love with a simple girl from the village, whose name is Dunyasha.
Bogoroditsk, like any other city in Russia, is a living history filled not only with architectural monuments, but also with legends that live there to this day.
There is a version about the existence of a palace dungeon – so large that a carriage could pass inside. It is believed that one of the palace doors leads to it. But during the restoration work in the castle, the secret passage was never found.
It was in this church that on January 17, 1847, the wedding of the Tula military and civil governor Nikolai Nikolaevich Muravyov took place with Catherine de Richemont, who, having converted to Orthodoxy, became known as Ekaterina Nikolaevna Muravyova. In many ways, thanks to this marriage, Muravyov had a successful career, becoming a prominent statesman, Count Muravyov – Amursky. Muravyov–Amursky played an important role in the history of the expansion of Russian possessions in Siberia: he was credited with the return of Amur, which was ceded to China in 1689; as well as the founding of the cities of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. In all important enterprises, Muravyov always had a wife next to him, who at critical moments restrained an excessively hot, hot-tempered husband, which allowed him, in the end, to make the right, balanced, reasonable decisions.
The monument to Muravyov-Amursky in Khabarovsk is depicted on a modern banknote with a face value of 5,000 rubles.
During the Great Patriotic War, the city was under occupation – from November 15 to December 15, 1941. During this time, the Germans executed 32 people and destroyed 65 percent of the houses during the retreat. The Bobrinsky Palace was also destroyed. But now the Bobrinsky Palace has been restored and has become a popular museum. Cinematographers are also interested in him. Many scenes of the feature film "Anna Karenina" directed by Karen Shakhnazarov were filmed at the Bobrinsky Palace.
