The city's prestige

FIVE STAR DIAMOND AWARD
The Grand Hotel is 125 years old

By Evel Economakis

        The doorkeeper greets you and you catch a glimpse of the image of the Bronze Horseman on his coat's gold buttons as you walk in.
        Thousands of people from all over the world stay here - at St. Petersburg's oldest hotel. It is here, over a cup of coffee or tea in its cafes and restaurants that the jet set and international businesspeople meet, new joint ventures are born, and contracts between Russian and foreign companies are signed. Our story is about the Grand Hotel Europe, Russia's first five-star hotel, an award it received in 1991. It became the first Russian hotel accepted by the Leading Hotels of the World organization. In March of last year, the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences awarded the hotel with the Five Star Diamond Award.
        Long ago the space occupied today by Hotel Europe was the site of two buildings: the Smirdin and Glazunov printing-house and Coulon's tavern, which was described by the French traveller, Marquis de Custine. The other building belonged to a certain Rogov where the Rossiia hotel was situated, which was popular among the city's intellectual and artistic circles. Later the house was rebuilt. First it was changed from a 4-floor to a 3-floor building and then a fourth floor was added to it. Fyodor Dostoevsky commented about the construction site in July 1873: "such is the architecture of a modern, huge hotel - it's being done efficiently, this is Americanism, hundreds of rooms, a major enterprise".
        The hotel had a total of 260 rooms of various sizes. Although its rooms were high-priced, it was never empty. The most expensive rooms were usually taken by foreign emissaries, wealthy negotiators and rich entrepreneurs. Restaurant, pastry store, tobacco shop, bakery, establishment producing "fruit-water" and ice-cubes, wine cellar, laundry on the top floor (a first for Russian hotels: unpleasant odors were now no longer a problem), barber shop, cobbler's workshop, tailor shop - these were all present. All floors had a dumb waiter and the hotel even had a telegraph. Underscoring its status as an international island where foreigners could meet and feel at home in Russia, the Europe had a group of translators working for it who could "translate all the world's languages". Rich merchants opened kiosks and stores, and its walls were covered with posters in English, French, German.
        Because of the hotel's rising popularity a fifth floor was added to it in 1908. On the roof a garden was built and a restaurant opened which soon gained a reputation as the very best in St. Petersburg. In those days the hotel's doorkeeper was dressed in a Cossack's uniform. The administrator waited for guests in a black frock coat in the lobby. You couldn't mistake the headwaiter because he was the only hotel employee permitted to wear a mustache or beard.
        In 1917 everything changed. The hotel was now often used for revolutionary meetings. Part of the building housed the Central Children's Quarantine Station for the city's many "besprizornie" (homeless children) - the victims of famine and civil war. Herbert Wells was among those who visited the Quarantine.
        A tragic page in the history of Grand Hotel Europe was during the blockade of Leningrad when it housed an evacuation hospital. Just two weeks after it opened, 1,250 patients, including many defenders of the city, were being treated here. Winter set in and the hospital's rooms had temperatures of minus 8 degrees Celsius. The walls of the once-sumptuous rooms were covered with hoarfrost. Once, a large German shell crashed through the window of a room facing Nevsky prospect. In January 1942 electricity and water were cut off. Water was taken from the Neva. The buckets were placed in the lobby, where they immediately developed a film of ice on them.
        Like so many grand hotels in Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe (like Shepheard's in Cairo, Mena House in Giza, Maiden's in Delhi, Parker House in Boston, the Baur au Lac in Zurich or the Splendide Royal in Lugano), Grand Hotel Europe often received international celebrities. Over the last few decades the hotel's guests have included Helmut Kohl, Jimmy Carter, Jacques Chirac, Bill Clinton, the Prince of Wales, George Bernard Shaw, Neil Armstrong, Demis Roussos, and Elton John, who gave two concerts in the city, one of them in the hotel's Europe restaurant to a small number of his fans. The hotel has also hosted such celebrities as Monserrat Caballe, Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, Maya Plisetskaya, Mstislav Rostropovich, Steve Martin, Jane Fonda, Ted Turner, Richard Gere, Joe Cocker, Sharon Stone, Claudia Schiffer, Vanessa Mae and Julio Iglesias, to name a few.
        There are no memorial plaques on the hotel. It is not part of official tours of city. But if its walls could speak, a fascinating slice of St. Petersburg's history would be told.