Catherine Park

This guide to Catherine Park in Saint Petersburg follows a bronze milkmaid seated over a shattered jug, cast by sculptor Pavel Sokolov in 1816 after an old French fable about a girl named Perette and her daydreams of the fortune her spilled milk would have bought. Fourteen years later the poet Alexander Pushkin wrote her a poem, calling her sorrow strangely eternal. In the autumn of 1941, as German troops closed in on Tsarskoye Selo, museum staff buried her in the ground to hide her from the occupation.