Church on the Blood & Kharitonov Palace: Voznesenskaya Hill Guide

Rising north of Plotinka along Karl Liebknecht Street, Voznesenskaya Hill (Ascension Hill) is one of the most historically charged heights in Yekaterinburg. Within a five-minute walk stand two landmarks from different eras of Russian history: the five-domed Church on the Blood, built on the ground where the last Russian Emperor and his family died in July 1918, and the neoclassical Rastorguyev-Kharitonov Palace with its landscaped English park.

The Ipatiev House and the Church on the Blood

At the corner of Karl Liebknecht Street and Klara Zetkin Street once stood the two-storey stone mansion bought in 1908 by retired military engineer Nikolai Ipatiev. Requisitioned by the Ural Regional Soviet in late April 1918 as the "House of Special Purpose", its basement became the site where deposed Emperor Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, their five children (Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei), and four attendants were executed on the night of 16 to 17 July 1918. The mansion was demolished in September 1977.

Constructed between 2000 and 2003 and consecrated on 16 July 2003, the Church on the Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land rises in Russian-Byzantine style with five gilded domes. The building is divided into two distinct liturgical levels:

• The Lower Crypt Temple: Dimly lit and austere, built around a reconstructed shrine marking the 23-square-metre basement room of the Ipatiev House, paired with an exhibition gallery displaying archival photographs and documents from 1918.
• The Upper Temple: Flooded with natural light from tall drum windows and anchored by a carved white marble iconostasis. Outside the entrance stairs stands a bronze sculpture of the imperial family descending into the cellar, while next door the Patriarchal Compound houses the Nicholas II Museum and library.

Rastorguyev-Kharitonov Palace (44 Karl Liebknecht Street)

Across the street from the 1792 Ascension Church (the oldest surviving stone church in the city) crowns the hilltop estate of the Rastorguyev-Kharitonov Palace. Begun in 1794 to 1795 and bought in 1798 by wealthy Old Believer merchant and Kyshtym gold-mine owner Lev Rastorguyev, the mansion was expanded into a sprawling neoclassical ensemble by 1824 with architect Mikhail Malakhov. After Rastorguyev died in 1823, his son-in-law Pyotr Kharitonov inherited the palatial residence before being exiled in 1837 over harsh conditions at the Kyshtym mines; from 1935 to 1937 the palace was restored as the Sverdlovsk Palace of Pioneers.

Walking Kharitonov Garden

Behind the palace spreads the 9-hectare Kharitonov Garden, laid out in 1826 in English landscape style with linden alleys and an artificial pond fed by underground springs. On a circular island in the middle of the water stands a white columned rotunda added during the 1935 to 1937 reconstruction by architect V. V. Yemelyanov. Pair Voznesenskaya Hill with a trip north to Ganina Yama Monastery.