Mon Repos Park

Mon Repos — 'my rest', 'my repose' in French — is today Russia's only rocky landscape park: it spreads along the shore of the Zashchitnaya bay of the Vyborg gulf, on the Tverdysh island — the former Linnansaari — in the northern part of Vyborg. The historic core of the museum reserve covers 161 hectares, of which the park proper takes thirty-one; the total area with the forest park of over a hundred hectares and part of the bay's water is 261 hectares. Its uniqueness is the rocky landscape: harsh shore granites overgrown with moss, icy streams and whimsically winding paths. The park is an important page in the cultural history of Russia's 'Petersburg period' and at the same time part of the history of Finland and European culture of the Enlightenment. Its owners were Pyotr Alekseyevich Stupishin, duke Friedrich Wilhelm Karl of Württemberg and the barons Nicolay — under the latter the manor-and-park ensemble of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries took shape. The ensemble is a monument of wooden classicist architecture: the main manor house and the library wing. Many outstanding people visited and loved the place — from members of the Russian Imperial House to Mikhail Glinka and Osip Mandelstam. In fairness: during the large-scale restoration of 2011–2019 the original structures of the main buildings were largely lost and replaced with replicas, sometimes described as dummies — the park is worth visiting for its landscape and the spirit of the place. The route through the park is a shore trail with exits onto the rocks, a bridge to the Ludwigstein island-cemetery, lookouts over the water. The rocks are slippery after rain, and the water is cold in any season: the walk is unhurried, two to three hours, best in the soft light of late morning, when the granites still hold the dew.