The House of the Emir of Bukhara

The plot at the modern address Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, 44b, in the early 1890s belonged to the French subject Gone, who planned to build a two-story building on it for the production of artistic bronze items. In the 1890s, the property passed to Cornet Stobeus. At the beginning of 1910, the land was purchased by Emir Said Abdulahad-khan, who decided to build a revenue house on it. Before the revolution, Bukhara had the status of a vassal state of the Russian Empire, but the emirs ruled it as absolute monarchs. The Russian protectorate was accepted in 1868, but the Russian Empire did not interfere in the internal affairs of the Bukhara Emirate and the Khiva Khanate (now Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), controlling only foreign policy. The emirate issued its own money, had an army, and had diplomatic representation in St. Petersburg.

The emir left a noticeable mark in Petersburg: he financed the construction of the cathedral mosque, a bright exotic religious building that grew up in close proximity to the heart of the city – the Peter and Paul Fortress. The client died of an incurable kidney disease in December of the same year; the project was continued by his heir Said Alim-khan. The last emir of Bukhara, Said Mir Muhammad Alim-khan, was born in 1880. At thirteen, he was sent to Saint Petersburg to study the science of state governance and military affairs and was educated at the Nikolaev Cadet Corps. In 1896, he returned home, having received confirmation from Russia of his status as heir apparent of Bukhara.

After the death of his father, he ascended the throne in December 1910. His reign promised to be reformist: the emir declared that he would not accept gifts and forbade officials from taking bribes and using taxes for personal purposes. But soon the reform supporters lost and were exiled to Moscow and Kazan, and the emirate returned to the old ways.

The emir’s house on the fashionable Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt attracts attention with its monumentality and unshakable grandeur. Art historian Sablin assessed this building as follows: “A curiosity, of course, is the fact that the puppet Eastern ruler wished to see his ‘palace’ built in the ‘style’ of an Italian palazzo, rather than orientalized like a mosque.”

The central part of the facade draws the eye with three-span arches stacked one on top of the other. The columns separating the arches of the lower tier are deliberately heavy – their shafts seem to have been passed through large square blocks, couplings. Elegant columns of the second tier decorate a three-arched deep loggia. The arches recede into the courtyard, whose space flows into the bustling thoroughfare stretching out in front of the house.

It is regrettable that this house, due to the large scale of its constituent elements and its impressive perception from a distance, was built on a relatively narrow avenue. But such a phenomenon was not uncommon in the dense pre-revolutionary Petersburg urban fabric.

The interiors have preserved stucco, floor tiles, and other decorative elements that form the image of a wealthy metropolitan house.

The front building is connected to five wings, forming two courtyards. Unlike many other revenue houses, the courtyard wings of the emir’s house are no less expressively designed than the one facing the avenue. The front facade is visually divided into two parts — the plinth with large rustication and massive semi-columns, and the lighter upper floors. The upper part of the arcade is decorated with three arches of the composite order. The facade cladding is made of dolomite marble from the Shishim deposit in the Middle Urals. Krichinsky’s project could not be fully realized due to the outbreak of World War I — to speed up construction, the planned balustrade along the third floor was removed, and some columns were made of wood instead of marble.

Soon after the October Revolution, Said Alim-khan fled to Afghanistan. The emir never got to live in the house on Kamennoostrovsky. Three of his sons remained in Russia. Two were later killed, and the third, Shokhmurad, renounced his father in 1929, taking the surname Olimov, and joined the Red Army. In the 1960s, he even taught at the Frunze Military Academy.

In March 1917, the building housed the 1st Machine Gun Reserve Regiment of the Petrograd garrison; later, the house was converted into communal apartments. Krichinsky lived in apartment No. 4 until 1923. Soon after his death, the apartment was occupied by a high-ranking Bolshevik (according to one version — the captain of the “Aurora”) with his family and servants; the apartment soon became communal. Among the famous residents of the house were obstetrician Dmitry Ott and physiologist Maria Petrova.

Since the 1920s, the house was used for communal housing, and the interiors and staircases suffered significantly. Already in the 1990s, marble balusters were knocked down, wall paintings were covered with graffiti, and stucco and wooden decorative elements (pedestals, railings, doors) were severely damaged.

As of 2020, apartments in the left entrance remain communal, while the right part of the house is divided into private apartments.

Urban legends associated with the emir’s house were featured in the film “Kommunalka” directed by Vladislav Vinogradov, filmed in the building in 1993.

The total value of the Bukhara emirs’ fortune was about 150 million gold rubles at the exchange rate of that time. When the Red Army entered the emirate, Said Alim equipped a caravan, and the gold was hidden somewhere in the Gissar Mountains. He himself went on a military campaign with only two horses loaded with gold. With them, he left for Afghanistan. It is said that in the 1930s, fanatics regularly crossed the USSR-Afghanistan border trying to return the treasures to the emir, but they never succeeded. This treasure has not been found to this day. And in revolutionary Leningrad, a legend was born that the emir somehow managed to hide all his treasures in the house on Kamennoostrovsky. Many generations of unsuccessful treasure hunters have looked at this house with hungry eyes.

The second legend, although not yet confirmed, is most likely true. Leningraders believed that the mosque and the emir’s house were connected by an underground passage, which was supposed to allow the ruler of Bukhara to go to prayer without any obstacles and at any time of day. There is no documentary evidence of the existence of an underground passage over one and a half kilometers long, but one of Krichinsky’s relatives claimed that such a passage must exist. And those who lived in the communal apartments of the luxurious house in the 1930s recalled that as children they played scouts in a long tunnel leading somewhere from the basement...

In 2023, the experimental film "Winter, Spring 21-22" was released, part of the events of which took place in the Emir’s house.

Sources:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дом_эмира_Бухарского

https://xn--c1acndtdamdoc1ib.xn--p1ai/kuda-shodit/mesta/dom-emira-bukharskogo/

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