The official name of Monrepos Park is the “State Historical-Architectural and Natural Museum-Reserve.” This picturesque landscape park is located on Tverdysh Island on the shore of Protective Bay of the Vyborg Gulf. Tverdysh Island was formerly called Castle Island (Swedish Slottsholmen, Finnish Linnansaari). When Vyborg was part of the Kingdom of Sweden, the land on the island belonged to the treasury and was managed by the governor of Vyborg Castle. The estate complex and a few small structures are situated on the 180-hectare territory. The natural landscape is located in a special physico-geographical region — Fennoscandia. Unique stone ridges from the glacial period made of rapakivi granite (rapakivi meaning “rotten stone”) reach heights of up to 20 meters in some areas. Water is an integral part of the park’s composition, connecting the mainland with a chain of rocky islands and giant boulders.

In the 16th century, the area was home to the Swedish crown’s hunting grounds called Lill Ladugård, where residents of Old Vyborg grazed cattle. After the Russian army’s victory in the Great Northern War, these lands became part of Russia. From 1760, the estate was owned by the commandant of Vyborg Fortress, Stupishin, who began improving it and decided to build a country house. Besides construction, the swamps were drained, the ground leveled, fruit and deciduous trees planted, and a greenhouse created. The name “Monrepos” was given to the estate by its next owner — the Prince of Württemberg. In French, it means “my repose.”

After Stupishin’s death, who left large debts, the owner of Lill Ladugård became the brother-in-law of Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, Friedrich Wilhelm Karl, Duke of Württemberg (1754–1816), appointed by Catherine II in 1784 as the Vyborg Governor-General. The Duke of Württemberg named his country residence in Lill Ladugård Monrepos (French Mon Repos, Place of My Rest), built a new house there, and expanded the park toward the coast. The Duke’s park was planned as a landscape park with winding paths providing frequent changes of scenery and ascents to observation points atop coastal cliffs. It was he who gave the estate the name “Monrepos,” which means “my repose” in French. At the end of 1786, after a conflict with Catherine II, the Duke of Württemberg was forced to leave Russia.

In 1788, Monrepos was acquired for use by Baron Ludwig Heinrich von Nicolai (1737–1820), secretary to Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna (sister of the Duke of Württemberg), a German poet and writer, one of the tutors of Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, and future president (1798–1803) of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. The golden period of Monrepos Park is associated with this family. Ludwig von Nicolai hesitated for a long time before buying the estate. After more than twenty years of service as the personal secretary to Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna, wife of the Tsesarevich Paul, he was tired of the formalities of court etiquette and dreamed only of spending summers in the countryside, where he would have his own house and garden. A garden he would arrange like a collection of poems, where each page would lead the reader into a world of lost Arcadia with its lush fields, waterfalls cascading from sheer cliffs, winding paths, and the quiet murmur of a stream. Monrepos seemed to offer all the conditions for this. But alas, it was too close to the Swedish border and had a harsh and cold climate... The decisive argument in favor of the purchase was the special status of Russian Finland. There was no serfdom here, and acquiring an estate near Vyborg did not make Nicolai the owner and master of human souls. Finland was free, or at least seemed so. “Freyland” — Ludwig called it in one of his letters. How important this last circumstance was to Ludwig von Nicolai is shown by the fact that two years before buying Monrepos, he sent his only son Paul to study in Germany to receive a European education and European ideas about personal freedom. Under Nicolai, the residential house was rebuilt according to the design of Italian painter Giuseppe Antonio Martinelli, and a Library wing was built as part of the ensemble with the house. The landscape park expanded to its modern size, and for two decades work was carried out on laying out alleys, creating shore reinforcements and embankments, building pavilions, arranging grottos, and installing sculptures. By the beginning of the 19th century, the park acquired the overall appearance that later allowed it to take its place among the most famous private parks in Europe. Nicolai outlined the concept of his park in the poem "The Monrepos Estate in Finland," written in 1804 and published several times throughout the 19th century.

In 1801, Emperor Alexander I granted Monrepos to Ludwig Heinrich von Nicolai as a perpetual hereditary possession, allowing him to pass the estate to his only son, Paul von Nicolai (1777–1866), a Russian diplomat. Remarkably, although Paul rarely visited his father’s estate, he was deeply attached to Monrepos and, inheriting it in 1820, did everything possible for its improvement and prosperity. The most recognizable architectural structures in the park — the Ludwigstein Chapel on the island necropolis, the marble obelisk in memory of the Broglie brothers, relatives of the wife, the pseudo-Gothic entrance gates adorned with the family coat of arms, and the pavilion over the Narcissus spring — appeared during the years when Monrepos belonged to Paul. Comparing Monrepos to his summer residence near Copenhagen, Paul wrote: “…our dear Monrepos has never seemed so delightful to me: since we have been here, the weather has been better than in Nyegord, not a breath of wind, the sea like a mirror, only brighter… We enjoy the fine days, which I have used to improve this beautiful creation.” The work to improve the “beautiful creation” was costly, and the estate’s income could not match the expenses. Apparently, this was not a significant obstacle for the baron, and he did not spare expenses when it came to maintaining Monrepos Park. An avid gardener, Paul participated in the garden’s arrangement even during his studies: sending flower seeds, botanical articles, and design projects for viewing platforms from Europe.

Building on his father’s unrealized plans but implementing them according to his own taste, Paul gave Monrepos Park the features that still strongly affect visitors emotionally. Almost all the monuments preserved in Monrepos to this day were created under Paul von Nicolai: the obelisk to the brothers de Broglie who died fighting Napoleon, the pavilion over the Narcissus spring, the sculpture of the hero of Finnish runes Väinämöinen, the pseudo-Gothic entrance gates (lost in the 1950s but rebuilt in 1982), and the Ludwigstein Chapel, erected by Paul in memory of his father. In 1834, by a Senate-approved petition submitted by Paul von Nicolai for the further preservation of the estate intact, Monrepos became a protected, non-saleable estate of the baronial Nicolai family, inherited by primogeniture.

Paul’s eldest son, Nikolaus Armand Michel von Nicolai (1818–1869), also a diplomat like his father, owned the estate for only three years. Neither he nor his successor Paul Ernst Georg von Nicolai (1860–1919), vice-president of the World Student Christian Movement, made significant changes to Monrepos Park. The only exception was the installation in 1873 of a new sculpture of Väinämöinen to replace the first one, installed by Paul von Nicolai in 1831, which had been vandalized.

After the October Revolution of 1917 and Finland’s subsequent independence, the Nicolai family remained at Monrepos. The estate’s territory was significantly reduced as the owners ceded much land to the city of Vyborg for developing settlements. The family retained the manor, park, forest area on the northern coast of the island, and a small dacha settlement on the eastern edge of the estate. After the death of Paul Ernst Georg, who left no heir, the estate passed to his sisters, the youngest of whom, Sofia von Nicolai (1862–1943), married Count Konstantin von der Pahlen (1861–1923). The Nicolais and the Pahlens lived at Monrepos until World War II, after which the city of Vyborg became part of the USSR.

In the 20th century, due to wars and the constant change of state ownership of these lands and estate owners, a period of gradual decline began. Before the start of hostilities, a rest home for Red Army soldiers was organized here. From 1941 to 1945, it became a Finnish hospital for wounded soldiers. The forests in the park zone were cut down, and monuments were destroyed.

In the post-war years, the Monrepos estate housed a kindergarten and a rest home for the Military Communications Academy. The Library wing was converted into a residential building. From the 1960s, the Central Park of Culture and Recreation was laid out here. Twenty years later, it looked quite deplorable. Disruption of the drainage system led to the drying of some ponds and the transformation of others into swamps. Rotten buildings, destroyed monuments and park pavilions, desecrated and devastated graves of the Nicolai family necropolis — this was how the famous Monrepos Park appeared at that time.

In 1988, thanks to the efforts of D. S. Likhachyov and the campaign he led to preserve this unique natural and architectural monument, a museum was established here. First, all the attractions were removed from the estate, after which restoration work began to restore architectural structures and the landscape.

Today, part of the monuments has been restored, the estate grounds tidied up, and Monrepos Park, as before, invites visitors. One can spend an entire day here without noticing how time flies while walking along picturesque paths in the shade of trees among moss-covered boulders. Moreover, this is enjoyable at any time of year: the park is always magnificent — as are the gulf and the Ludwigstein rock.

Sources:

https://wikiway.com/russia/vyborg/park-monrepo/

https://www.parkmonrepos.org/o_muzee/istoriya

Yulia Moshnick, “On a ‘Danish Episode’ in the History of Monrepos”