The Great Courtyard opened after the completion of the reconstruction works.
The Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace
From the time of the Winter Palace's construction in the mid-18th century, the Great Courtyard was paved with cobblestones. By the porch on its western side there was a ground used for the changing of the guard. In 1885 a landscape garden was laid out in the middle of the courtyard to the design of the architect Nikolai Gornostayev. The garden was rectangular in shape with a fountain set in the middle. The middle part was planted with trees of several varieties, while a hedge was made around the perimeter.
In the years since the Great Courtyard lost its former attraction: there were diseased trees in the garden; the paths became covered over; the accumulated level of the ground was considerably higher than it had been; the fountain did not work; the main gates were deformed and a large part of their decoration had been lost.
The reconstruction of the Great Courtyard and its garden began in 2002. All the preparatory work, involving relaying utilities, had been completed earlier. The courtyard was again paved with cobblestones, with two pathways of granite flagstones being laid out from the Palace Square side to the ramps by the Ambassadors' Vestibule of the Winter Palace. Lawns were laid out in the garden, pathways of pressed earth formed and a flower garden made. The fountain began to work again. The centrepiece acquired the look of a Victorian garden of the 1880s.
In 2003 work on the restoration and recreation of the decoration of the main gates of the Great Courtyard that had begun in the 1980s was completed. The gates, created in the 1880s to the design of the architects Gornostayev and Roman Melzer, suffered considerably in February 1917. At that time, following a resolution of the Provisional Government, they were stripped of the double-headed eagles, imperial monograms and crowns. Many more decorative details were lost in the decades that followed.
For the celebrations of St Petersburg's 300th anniversary the main gates of the palace recovered their original appearance: their constructions and mechanisms were restored; the lost decorative ferrous and non-ferrous elements were remade: rosettes, palm and laurel branches, the double-headed eagles, crowns and missing details of the imperial monograms were made of hammered copper sheet and gilded.
The work was carried out under the direction of V. V. Yefimov, Deputy Chief Architect of the State Hermitage. The restoration of the Great Courtyard was the finishing stage in the implementation of the plan for a new entrance to the Hermitage.
