The Redkino Manor is located on the border of the Volosovsky and Luzhsky districts, 150 km from Saint Petersburg, on the bank of the Vruda River. It is first mentioned in the 1500 Vodskaya Pyatina Cadastral Book as the village of Redkino in the Yastrebinsky Nikolsky Pogost of the Koporye Uyezd. During the Great Northern War of 1700-1721, among the battles of "local significance" that took place in the territory of the modern Leningrad region, the battle near the Redkino Manor in March 1702 holds a special place. The clash of Russian troops against the Swedes was one of the first successful ones.
After driving out the Swedes, Peter I distributed the lands of Ingria to his close associates. Estates standing apart from peasant households began to be called manors. In 1712, the Redkino Manor with more than a thousand desyatinas of land was granted to brothers Peter and Ivan Kikins, the brothers of the tsar’s valet Alexander Vasilyevich Kikin. They owned the estate for a short time, as Alexander Vasilyevich was executed in 1718 in connection with the case of Tsarevich Alexei.
In 1718, Peter transferred the Redkino Manor to Ivan Romodanovsky, son of the well-known figure of his youth, Fyodor Yuryevich Romodanovsky. In 1722, Ivan gave Redkino as a dowry to his son-in-law Mikhail Gavrilovich Golovkin, who built a wooden church dedicated to the Nativity of Christ at the manor.
It was granted by Peter I in 1723 to his cabinet minister Baron Ivan Antonovich Cherkasov, a privy councilor and cabinet secretary to Peter I, Catherine I, and Elizabeth Petrovna. The baronial Cherkasov family descends from him.
Under Ivan Antonovich, all buildings in the estate were wooden, and the garden was formal. Upon division, Redkino passed to his son - Ivan Ivanovich Cherkasov (1732-1811).
In 1782, he retired with the rank of vice-admiral and lived at the estate, building a stone Trinity Church, consecrated in 1788. It became the architectural and planning dominant of the estate. Cherkasov created a new manor ensemble in Redkino Manor in the neoclassical style.
In 1790, he sold the estate to Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Fedorovich Volodimirov, who built farm buildings on the estate. His grandson, Actual State Councillor Alexey Ivanovich Sakharov, replaced all wooden structures with stone ones and carried out a major renovation of the Trinity Church. Alexey Ivanovich erected service buildings, barns, stables with a carriage house, a tavern, a gardener’s house, a cloth factory, and a mill. The most striking structure was the grain storage building with a Gothic tower and arcades.
During Sakharov’s time, a distillery operated, founded back under Cherkasov and lasting until the 1830s. It was housed in a wooden building equipped with a steam engine.
Left unattended in the last years of Soviet rule, over several decades the beautiful manor was almost completely destroyed. Several buildings remain to this day but require restoration. Despite this, the Redkino Manor is a genuine monument that evokes the atmosphere of that era.
The Redkino Manor holds many stories and myths. Locals say there was a women’s monastery here that vanished overnight, and that ghosts have taken up residence inside the house, refusing to let new owners in, but this information cannot be verified.
Sources:
https://pastvu.com/p/762490?history=1
https://vk.com/wall-143157593_14
https://dzen.ru/a/Y6F9oarnWHzoaNcy
