Catherine the Great: From Stettin to St Petersburg

Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, the future Catherine the Great, was born in Stettin on 2 May 1729. Her father held the rank of a Prussian general and governed the city. She was delivered in the family residence at 1 Farna Street, and the family later moved to the Ducal Castle, which had been allocated to him as garrison commander. Today the city is Szczecin in Poland, and the castle was rebuilt between 1958 and 1980.

Precisión del lugar: Sources place her birth at a house on Farna Street, but the family later lived in the Ducal Castle; the pin marks the castle.

Para el visitante: Szczecin's Ducal Castle is open to visitors; the Farna Street house is a separate address nearby.

After their marriage, Catherine and Peter settled in the palace of Oranienbaum, which remained the residence of the "young court" for many years. In the summer of 1762 Peter lingered here with his Holstein-born courtiers and relatives while Catherine lived in another palace nearby. On the night of 8 July 1762 she learned that one of her co-conspirators had been arrested by her estranged husband. Between 1762 and 1766 she had the "Chinese Palace" built at Oranienbaum; serious restoration of the estate began only in the late 1990s.

Para el visitante: The palace and park lie at Lomonosov, west of Saint Petersburg.

The imperial couple had moved into the new Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. When Catherine seized power, she paraded her seven-year-old son Paul on the Winter Palace's balcony to an excited crowd below. She was Empress of Russia from 9 July 1762 until her death in 1796. The Hermitage Museum, which now occupies the whole Winter Palace, began as Catherine's personal collection.

Para el visitante: The Winter Palace on Palace Square is part of the Hermitage Museum.

Catherine was crowned at the Assumption Cathedral in Moscow on 22 September 1762. From 1547 to 1896 the coronations of Russian monarchs took place here. Her Great Imperial Crown was produced in a record two months, weighed 2.3 kg and holds 75 pearls and 4,936 Indian diamonds. From 1762 it was the coronation crown of all Romanov emperors, and it is now on display in the Moscow Kremlin Armoury Museum.

Para el visitante: The cathedral is in the Moscow Kremlin; the crown is in the Armoury Museum.

Tsarskoye Selo, 30 kilometres south of Saint Petersburg, became the summer residence of Catherine's court. In May 1770 she ordered the planting of the first English landscape garden here. In a letter to Voltaire in 1772 she wrote: "Right now I adore English gardens, curves, gentle slopes, ponds in the form of lakes." In 1779 she hired the Scottish architect Charles Cameron to build the Chinese Village at Tsarskoye Selo.

Para el visitante: The Catherine Palace and park are in the town of Pushkin.

Catherine commissioned the equestrian statue of Peter the Great from the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet. A German princess who married into the Romanov line, she was anxious to connect herself to Peter the Great to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The pedestal is a rapakivi granite boulder known as the Thunder Stone. The finished statue was unveiled in a ceremony with thousands in attendance and opened to the public on 18 August (7 August, Old Style) 1782.

Para el visitante: The statue is in Senate Square, in the open air.