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Tashkent is a city of contrasts. Here you can see both the monuments of oriental culture and the buildings in the European Art Nouveau style. One of such buildings is the Palace of Prince Romanov. A residence surprisingly harmoniously blended into the architectural ensemble of the city.
Romanov Palace in Tashkent - was built in 1891 by the architects VS Heinzelman and AL Benois for the Grand Duke. In 1874, after a family scandal, the prince was exiled to exile. In Turkestan, the Grand Duke lived first under the name of Colonel Volynsky. Later he began to call himself Iskander. This name (later, Highest legalized) is worn by his descendants - the princes Iskander. Later (in 1894 or 1895) he married another lady - Daria Chasovitinova - 15-year-old daughter of a Tashkent resident belonging to the Cossack family.
The Grand Duke was engaged in business, he was the owner of a number of enterprises in Tashkent. He opened a soap factory, photographic workshops, billiards, selling kvass, processing rice, cotton manufactories. With money received from entrepreneurial activity, he built the first in Tashkent cinema - "Khiva", and with his own money he was engaged in laying irrigation canals in the Hungry Steppe.
The Grand Duke was a collector. The collection of paintings of European and Russian painting, collected by him and brought from St. Petersburg, was the basis for the creation in 1919 of the Museum of Arts in Tashkent, which has one of the richest collections of paintings of European painting among the art museums of Central Asia.
Nikolai Konstantinovich died on January 27, 1918, from pneumonia. As a memory of the Grand Duke in Tashkent his palace, erected from a gray-yellow brick, has been preserved. The palace was a long, two-story building made of burnt gray-yellow brick, with a basement room specially equipped for living, where it was cool even in the heat. In the basement there was also an extensive kitchen. On the flanks of the palace were built round towers, beautifully merging with the building.
On the territory around the palace, the famous Tashkent botanist and pharmacist II Krause was defeated by a garden. At the entrance to the building there are sculptures of dogs, on both sides of the staircase there are bronze deer.
Like many other monuments in Tashkent, the palace has changed its history many times. Until the early 1990's, it housed the Republican Palace of Pioneers, a museum of antiques and jewelry of Uzbekistan. Now the palace is the Reception House of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan
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