Izmaylovo

The estate briefly flourished under Tsar Alexis and his daughter Sophia Alekseyevna, being the center of a large estate park with model farms, workshops and hunting reserves. The heart of the estate, the Izmailovo Court of Tsar Alexis, was a wooden palace built on an artificial island - a hill surrounded by man-made ponds. The present-day Court retains two sets of palace gates, a cathedral and a barbican tower built in the 1670s-1680s. Other extant structures of the Court were built by Konstantin Thon and Mikhail Bykovsky in 1839–1859, when the island was converted into an almshouse, and in the 1970s. The present-day Court is a freely accessible open-air museum.