Margarita Chernova House: a Gift to the Actress from a Merchant

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Margarita Chernova House, also known as a house with caryatids, is an evidence of ardent love and a place visited by Feodor Chaliapin and Nikolay Gumilyov. A famous merchant Paramonov, who lived in Rostov in the late XIX century, presented a mansion to Margarita Chernova, the local theater actress, his ladylove. The grandiose building had to express the whole power of the merchant's love: the architect was generous with statues of caryatids and Atlanteans, flowerpots and garlands, architraves and stucco moldings. The owner of the gifted mansion set her heart on the second floor, and the first one was handed over for a pharmacy.

There was arranged a kind of a cultural salon in Margarita Chernova’s house, where Chaliapin himself sang, and Gumilyov read his poems and watched the play "Gondola", staged after his own writing. The urban legend has it that Margarita Chernova House was connected with the neighboring house of the collector Novosiltsev by an underground passage. And this supposedly helped to preserve his collection of Russian and foreign paintings: when the Bolsheviks appeared in the city, Novosiltsev took the pictures to his neighbor Chernova’s house. It is impossible to verify this, as the fate of the collection’s best part is unknown. In 1920, Margarita Chernova House was nationalized, and she herself disappeared. The building was used for the party archive, the children's commune and the regional prosecutor's office. In the 1990s, the building was nearly demolished because of the heating system problems, but in the early XХI century it was completely reconstructed and gained its original appearance. Today there is a bank in Margarita Chernova House.

Margarita Chernova House: a Gift to the Actress from a Merchant

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