Manor-Palace in Kurisove

The Kuris Palace-Manor is the former manor of the Kuris noble family in the village of Kurisove in Odesa Oblast. It is one of the first examples of Romantic architecture in Ukraine.

The estate was founded by Ivan Kuris, former head of Suvorov's chancellery and later administrator of secret affairs under the commander-in-chief. For valour in the wars against the Turks he was granted lands on the right side of the Tyligul river "in the region newly acquired from the Ottoman Porte" (from the "Open Letter" of the governor of Yekaterinoslav V. V. Kakhovsky). On the lands received Colonel Kuris built his estate. In honour of the first Orthodox church erected on former Turkish land, Ivan Kuris named the new estate Pokrovske.

Surviving to this day are the palace of Arab-Gothic architecture, built of local shell limestone (evidently inspired by the Vorontsov Palace in Alupka), individual elements of the English park that survived the felling by the Romanian occupiers, the service building and the domed Pokrovska church. The oldest part of the palace (the eastern one) was erected in the 1820s. The western part was added in 1891-92 to a design by N. K. Tolwiński. The authors of the book "Let There Be Truth" (Odesa, 2005), devoted to the history of the estate, write:

Under Ivan Onufrievich Kuris only a large manor house, handsome for those times, was built, with modest decoration and a portico with columns. Everything else that is today called the Kuris castle was probably made <…> under his grandson Ivan Iraklievich.

After the October Revolution the Kuris estate was plundered, and the remains of the landowners were thrown out of the family crypt into a field. In Soviet times the manor was occupied by an agricultural school.

Machine-translated from “Усадьба Курисов” on the Russian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Manor-Palace in Kurisove ranks #5,363 of 7,738 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #77 of the 183 mapped in Ukraine. Founded 1810, it is older than 12% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 562 atlas entries founded in the 19th century. See how Ukraine compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in Russian) ↗