Cottage Stamboli

Photography until 1917

The construction of a seaside villa , designed by a St. Petersburg architect O. E. Wegener ^[2], began in 1909 and lasted five years.

The merchant of the first guild, Joseph Stamboli , the son of a tobacco manufacturer Veniamin Stamboli, wanted to present the estate as a wedding gift to his future wife Rakhili Ilinichna Bobovich ^[3] . The construction of the cottage cost Joseph Stamboli a very large sum for those times - 1 million 100 thousand rubles.

The construction of the building in the Spanish-Moorish style was completed in 1915 ^[4] .

Joseph Stamboli lived in the rebuilt mansion for only three years. After the October Revolution, the entire Stamboli family left Crimea and settled in France.

In 1920, the cottage became the location of the Cheka .

Since 1921, one of the first sanatoriums for workers was located in the summer cottages. In 1925, the sanatorium was named "Moscow co-worker", and before the war the sanatorium was named after Joseph Stalin.

During the occupation of the city of Feodosia by German-Romanian troops, the Stamboli cottage served as a hospital for German wounded soldiers and officers. Next to it was a German cemetery for servicemen of the 132nd Infantry Division of General Fritz Lindemann with more than 1,500 graves by 1944. After the liberation of the city, the cemetery was razed to the ground. In 2003, the Volksbund German society , together with specialists from the Feodosia Museum of Local Lore and the Yug search squad, exhumed and the remains were reburied at the German military cemetery near the village of Goncharnoye ^[5] .

In 1970-1980, the clinic of Alexander Dovzhenko operated on the basis of Dacha Stamboli.

After the collapse of the USSR, the cottage was bought by private individuals and turned into a restaurant. Despite the fact that it became an object of business, the cottage was gradually being destroyed.

The building was built in the Art Nouveau style with a dominant exterior in the Neo-Moorish style ^[4] . The gallery at the main entrance offers a spacious view of Theodosius Bay . The cottage with its appearance gives the area a rich oriental flavor: a high minaret of the estate, terraces, turrets and evergreen cypresses that grow around - all these are traces of the former greatness and wealth of the Stamboli family.

The interior decoration of the cottage is no less luxurious. The builders used marble of various colors and shades, valuable wood, stucco moldings and sculptures. The stone works were performed by the Feodosian masters Yani Fok, brothers Brekhov, Yani Kosari, A. Borisov, I. Ladonkin, A. Schmidt, A. Vasiliev, Yu. Golonos, as well as St. Petersburg master Matthew Korolev.

Joseph Stamboli's house was the last such luxury building on the embankment of Feodosia, since the First World War , which began after its construction, and then the impending Civil War, no longer allowed local residents to build such expensive buildings.

After the revolution, the poet Maximilian Voloshin wrote that structures like the Stamboli cottage and other villas on the Feodosia embankment are absolutely tasteless and corrupting the tastes of the people. He even regretted that the Bolsheviks did not blow up the magnificent buildings, leaving the city to remain in a kind of “Museum of bad taste”. Thanks to the article by Maximilian Voloshin, “Art in Feodosia,” due to its misunderstanding, the poet is often accused on the Internet of proposing to blow up the cottage and thus deprive the Theodosians of their architectural heritage ^[6] .

In the article "Art in Feodosia" Maximilian Voloshin ^[7] wrote :

The Catherine Embankment with its palaces in the style of Turkish baths , brothels and lemonade stalls, with its concrete Erechteions, plaster "Milos", naked pistachio ladies from decadent card-posters represents the completely finished "Museum of Bad Taste". The Bolsheviks and anarchists, in whose hands Theodosius visited twice, did not want to provide her with the only service they were capable of: they did not blow up these villas. I don’t think that in this subtle and evil way they would like to punish the bourgeoisie, preserving its shame for future times - no, they themselves were under the spell of the monumentality of these buildings: the tradesman smells the tradesman from afar ^[8] ...

• Fragments of the interior
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  The ceiling of one of the rooms of the estate

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  Ceiling Elements

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  A staircase that leads to the second floor of the cottage

In post-Soviet times , a cafe with the same name operated on the estate's territory. In 1999, former President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma once dined there ^[9] .

Tombstones from the Karaite cemetery were preserved on the territory ^[10] .

In May 2013, the first in Ukraine museum of underwater archeology and a laboratory for the study of marine finds was opened in the summer cottages ^{[11] [12]} . The museum and laboratory are a branch of the Crimean Republican institution "Black Sea Center for Underwater Research" ^[13] .

For the first time, the decision to open such a museum in Feodosia was announced by the former mayor of the city, Alexander Bartenev , after one of the UNESCO inspectors visited Crimea. According to Bartenev, the museum should become no less attractive place for tourists than the National Art Gallery named after I.K. Aivazovsky ^[14] .

• Yuri Komlach, photo by A. Svetovidov. Myths and cottages of Stamboli in Feodosia (rus.) // Newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets". - 2017. - February 1.