Lyalichi has been known since 1654, when it belonged to one of the Polish magnates, and later passed to the Mglin town hall and Ukrainian landlords. In 1775, it was granted along with 2,500 peasants and 40,000 dessiatins of land by Catherine II to her favorite, Pyotr Vasilyevich Zavadovsky. Count Zavadovsky (1739–1812) served in the Little Russian Collegium, then in the office of the General-Governor of Little Russia, Rumyantsev. He participated in the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774). He distinguished himself in the battles of Larga and Kagul, and took part in the preparation of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. Pyotr Zavadovsky met Empress Catherine II in 1775 at a ball celebrating the victory over the Turks.

The stately and prominent count caught Catherine II’s attention. She bestowed upon him the highest favor and gave him a diamond ring from her own hand. 

In 1775, he became Catherine II’s cabinet secretary, later her aide-de-camp. He handled her correspondence, prepared decrees, and was accountable only to Catherine II.

Excerpt from a letter from Catherine II to Pyotr Zavadovsky:

“…Petrosha, it is absolutely true that I love you, and I will love you, and I firmly remain so. And you grieve in vain. Believe me for your own peace of mind. Truly, I do not deceive you, I love you with all my soul…”

Zavadovsky’s relationship with the Empress was short-lived. Already in 1777, Catherine II shifted her favor to a new favorite, Semyon Zorich. Pyotr Vasilyevich was sent on a six-month leave. Zavadovsky took the break-up with Catherine hard. To console him somewhat, the Empress wrote: “Be assured that I will always be exceptionally well disposed toward you. Calm your spirit and be healthy and cheerful…”

Of course, Pyotr Zavadovsky married. Probably not for love. It is said that he remembered his Empress until the end of his days. From 1781, he was manager of the Nobles’ Loan Bank in St. Petersburg, and from 1786 director of the State Loan Bank. Under Alexander I, he was appointed senator, member of the Permanent Council, then chairman of the Commission for Drafting Laws. He was the first Minister of National Education.

Once Zavadovsky attended a discussion of the Assignation Bank project in St. Petersburg and expressed his admiration for the building. Catherine graciously agreed to help her former favorite. The famous architect Giacomo Quarenghi took on the design of the palace in Lyalichi and, it is said, personally supervised its construction. It is hard to imagine that an architect, author of the most famous projects in St. Petersburg, suddenly took on a project in some Lyalichi. Nevertheless, a huge estate complex was built and named Ekaterinodar in honor of the benefactress.  According to one version, to deliver bricks to Lyalichi, Zavadovsky lined up several thousand serfs in rows all the way to the Unecha brick factory. A living chain of people stretched for 30 km. For several months, serfs passed bricks hand to hand for the palace construction. Gilded stucco, silk tapestries, beautiful paintings by famous artists, gold and silver tableware, luxurious furniture filled the interior. The palace had 365 rooms, corresponding to the days of the year, and one of them was always ready to welcome the highest guest. Above every window of the house was a bas-relief of Catherine II, and in every room stood her bust. But Catherine never visited this place.

The complex consisted of a large palace-style main house with galleries and wings, various utility and service buildings, the Church of Catherine, and a vast landscaped park with a summer palace, a rotunda temple, various “follies,” and statues.

After Catherine’s death, Paul I learned from “well-wishers” that Count Zavadovsky’s palace was much taller than the Mikhailovsky Palace. In those old times, it was considered bad form to have buildings taller than those of the royal family. Zavadovsky learned that an inspection was coming and ordered the first floor of his palace to be buried. Whether this really happened is unknown. No excavations or research have been conducted. The two-story building, as it may appear at first glance, actually has three floors. The first floor is underground.

Later, the estate repeatedly passed from one owner to another, losing its original appearance. In 1812, Zavadovsky’s son sold it to the Engelhardt family, from whom it passed in 1847 to Baron Cherkasov, then to a certain Atryganyev, then to merchant Samykov, and at the beginning of the 20th century to the Gomel merchants Golodets, under whom it finally fell into neglect, losing many garden and park structures and the palace’s interior decoration. After the October Revolution, when a Jewish commune was established here, later transformed into an agricultural and craft artel, the destruction process intensified; it was completed by the Great Patriotic War. To date, among the numerous estate buildings, the ruined palace house with galleries and wings (walls of the lower floor with columns of the courtyard portico), a small part of the fence and the pylons of the entrance gates, one of the greenhouse buildings (converted into a stable), and the Church of Catherine without ceilings and interior decoration have survived. The huge park has been cut down in many places and is heavily neglected. In the 1980s, the “Specproektrestavratsiya” Institute developed a restoration project for the estate, envisaging the restoration of the palace house, church, and some buildings.

The estate is an outstanding monument of Russian architecture and garden-park art of the mature classicism era, one of Quarenghi’s best works. An astonishingly beautiful complex with a number of magnificent buildings united by a park occupied a huge plot enclosed by a high brick fence. Its planning structure was based on a system characteristic of large Russian estates of the second half of the 18th century. The main core of the composition was a three-story palace house with lowered rounded galleries ending in one-story wings. The gallery wings enclosed a large ceremonial courtyard in front of the house, the long lateral sides of which were limited by greenhouse buildings (later the southern one was converted into a stable), and the front façade was a stone fence with monumental entrance gates in the center. A road led to this main entrance to the estate from the west, passing through the gates and courtyard directly to the palace; it was the central compositional axis of the entire complex.

The second axis, perpendicular to the first, was a wide linden alley running along the stone fence with gates. It separated from the palace house a large group of utility and service buildings. At the southern end of the alley, outside the main estate territory, on a small village square, stood the Church of Catherine, to which an access road intersecting an earthen dam approached from the east.

Behind the palace, in front of its park façade, was a flower parterre, and to the south of it, a fruit garden. Opposite the palace, on the other side of the pond, stretched a huge landscaped park with the Temple of Gratitude in the form of a columned rotunda, which housed a statue of Rumyantsev-Zadunaysky, and a two-story stone summer palace on a glade deep in the park.

A large estate house in the style of mature classicism, whose truly palace character was previously emphasized by the magnificent interior decoration. The brick and plastered building was erected in 1780–95. Its volumetric and planning composition, typical for that time, was based on the main three-story volume with a semi-basement, treated in a truly Palladian spirit. Rectangular in plan, it was topped with a hipped roof crowned by a dome on a square base. The centers of the main façades, courtyard and park, were decorated with majestic six-column Corinthian order porticos with pediments, raised on the first floor’s arched recesses. The centers of the side façades were marked by two-column loggias at the second-floor level. Widely spreading rounded galleries, equal in height to the first floor of the house, connected it with two-story rectangular wings in plan.

The façades of all parts of the house were distinguished by strict proportions and restrained decoration, forming an overall frontal, emphatically symmetrical composition with a clearly expressed horizontal direction. The first floor of the house and the galleries with wings had an identical design: walls with a common plinth band and board rustication, the same rhythm of arched openings and windows with paneled niches below, shelves at the springing level, and keystones decorated with masks, and a common crowning cornice. Rectangular windows of the second, ceremonial floor were framed with thin elegant frames with sandriks; the third-floor windows above a narrow cornice band were also rectangular but smaller and horizontal. A strict entablature with modillions in the cornice completed the façades, as well as the gently sloping pediments of the porticos, which, together with the loggias, were their main decoration. The rusticated base of the dome was pierced by large semicircular openings flanked by small false windows.

The internal structure of the house is traditional for palace-type estates. The first floor housed the vestibule, wardrobe, reception rooms, the owner’s study, and service rooms. The second floor contained the dining room, living rooms, and ceremonial halls, the most significant of which were the “mirror” hall intended for dances and concerts and the centrally located round hall with columns supporting the choir lofts. The ceremonial rooms also included two loggias symmetrically located in the center of the side façades. The third floor, of low height, contained the owner’s family living quarters. The basement housed the kitchen, pantries, and numerous utility rooms. The wings and rounded house wings were intended for guests. The layout of the wings is interesting. The rooms, arranged in two floors on the park side, were connected by a high one-story corridor running along the outer wall of the main façade.

The house plan is enfilade. All rooms of various purposes on the second and third floors were grouped around the central two-story domed hall. The main ceremonial halls, as usual in estates of that time, were located on the park side. The ceremonial staircase, to the right of the vestibule on the first floor, immediately behind the portico, led by two flights to the second floor. Several service staircases connected all floors, including the basement and third floor. The basement and central rooms of the first floor were covered with barrel vaults resting on massive walls; the main round hall was covered by a dome, and the “mirror” hall by a vault-like ceiling; all other rooms on the floors had flat wooden ceilings.

Sculpture, stucco, monumental decorative painting, valuable types of stone and wood, various expensive finishing materials, mirrors, and tapestries were used for the palace’s interior decoration.

The Church of Catherine was built in place of the former wooden one in 1793–97 from brick and plastered. A magnificent estate church in the style of mature classicism, distinguished by the monumentality of architectural forms and a unique volumetric-spatial composition. It belongs to the type of four-pillar cross-domed churches with five domes, a three-part single-apse altar, and two-tier bell towers. The building’s peculiarity is the two-tier quadrangular bell towers placed in line with the main western façade of the church and connected to it by open colonnades.

In the ceremonial and strict decoration of the main façades, the main role is played by the colonnades, especially spectacularly deployed on the western side. The lower tier of the church and the bell tower quadrangles are united by a high two-stage plinth, horizontal rustication of the walls, and identical large rectangular openings or niches with keystones. Only arched niches accentuate the low parts of the altar and the walls at the edges of the colonnades. The upper tier of the church and bell tower quadrangles is smooth, pierced by large semicircular windows and paneled niches above the lower openings. Its entablature also encompasses the portico and side colonnades. The church drum is decorated with arched (below) and rectangular (above) niches in the piers between the arched windows. Above the wide openings of the bell towers’ belfry are small pediments.

The church interior, despite significant distortions and losses, produces an impression of strict solemnity. It is dominated by a well-lit under-dome space, united by wide side arches with the arms of the cross, which are covered with barrel vaults. The main entrance to the church was arranged through the portico; additional entrances were located in the center of the side façades.

Strictness and elegance characterized the church’s interior decoration (partially preserved). Stucco played the main role, emphasizing the main architectural divisions of the walls and vaults.

Behind the palace and on both sides of it, on the slopes descending from the west and east sides to the Izluchye stream, lies a huge park. Originally, its territory reached 150 hectares.

The park’s planning structure is a combination of a regular part with a landscape one, with the latter territorially dominating. The regular zone consisted of the ceremonial courtyard, flower parterre stretching from the palace’s park façade almost to the lake, and partially the fruit garden, which slightly entered the park territory from the south.

The rest of the territory resembled living nature in its arrangement. The park territory was enclosed by stone walls of a multi-verst fence. The entrance and driveway to the park were through the palace’s ceremonial courtyard.

The middle part of the park was occupied by artificial ponds formed in the Izluchye valley. They divided the park territory into two parts — eastern and western. The entire composition of the park space was built around the ponds.

It is appropriate to note a feature testifying to the estate creators’ desire to connect nature and dwelling as closely as possible: picturesque depictions of views of the park and the large alley inside the building, on the walls of the main staircase. Depicted in summer, they helped winter guests of the palace imagine and appreciate the park’s beauty in other seasons. Thus, the park “was present” in the house. This achieved unity of nature and structures, park and architecture.

On both sides, the open middle of the western part of the park was framed by oak groves and clusters of other trees. To the south, it adjoined a large fruit garden, and below it, a birch grove looked into the waters. The eastern part of the park, located behind the ponds on the slope opposite the palace, was immersed in preserved centuries-old groves. In the emerald groves stood two stone flowers — the “Summer Palace” and the “Temple of Gratitude” — they inspired this natural part of the park with the art of architecture.

Besides the palace and these two buildings, about fifty sculptures were placed in the park territory, enlivening and decorating it at scenic spots. Bridges, gazebos, piers, and other so beloved “follies” of that time filled the park. There was everything considered necessary in a serfdom-era park. Even a menagerie, whose inhabitants populated the park.

In the Izluchye floodplain, within the park, there were two large and one small pond. The fourth pond adjoined the park territory directly, and a fifth was somewhat upstream. All water bodies had free “natural” outlines.

Park landscaping was based on skillful use of local species of trees and shrubs: birch, oak, maple, pine, linden, black alder. Ash, elm, white acacia, bird cherry, poplar, Siberian cedar pine, Daurian moonseed, Amur and wild American grapes, and other species were also found. The assortment of shrubs was quite diverse: spindle tree, viburnum, blackthorn, rosehip (degenerated cultivated roses), dogwood, lilac. Sometimes surprising encounters with plants not typical of the local flora, preserved from past times, occurred: barberry, rowanberry, honeysuckle, oak-leaved spirea, and beautiful spirea. In the southeastern part of the park, there used to be a whole alley of thuja. On the palace’s ceremonial courtyard and other places grew individual specimens of pyramidal poplar. Along the edges of the main alley, several almost three-hundred-year-old lindens have been preserved.

Currently, among the numerous estate buildings, the ruined palace house with galleries and wings (partially — walls of the lower floor with columns of the courtyard portico), a small part of the fence and the pylons of the entrance gates, one of the greenhouse buildings converted into a stable, and the estate Church of Saint Catherine without ceilings and interior decoration have survived.

Sources:

https://www.rgo.ru/ru/article/usadba-grafa-pv-zavadovskogo-v-lyalichah

https://libryansk.ru/surazhusadbazavadovskogo.21354/

https://klintsy.info/news/block-3485/

https://trip32.ru/usadba-zavadovskogo-p-v-v-ljalichah/