Of course, you have been to this beautiful corner of the Summer Garden more than once. They walked along a small courtyard to the palace of Peter I, climbed the porch, but they hardly thought about how it all looked two centuries ago.

Meanwhile, things were different. It is hard to imagine, but at the beginning of the 18th century there was water in the place of the courtyard – a rectangular pond. “Havanese” – they called him then.

Along this creek, connected to the Fontanka, a river “fleet” moored right to the palace – boats, yachts. This is reminiscent of old engravings – a similar method of transportation in the early years of the existence of St. Petersburg was quite common. By water, for example, they also got into the Menshikov Palace on Vasilyevsky Island.

Where did the Gavanets disappear to at the Summer Petrovsky Palace? It is known that when the granite embankment of the Fontanka was erected at the end of the 18th century, the reservoir was filled up. And what about the embankment that bordered it? Has she survived? This was found out only a few years ago during the restoration of the palace building.

When building a fire reservoir, the builders unexpectedly came across a stone partition. It turned out that a platform made of clinker bricks laid in a herringbone is moving away from it. And on the vertical stone wall were two large forged mooring rings. What is this – the remains of the building?

They dug a trench. And then the south side of the Havanese embankment opened up. The remains of the masonry and the ring, which were found earlier, according to experts, belong to the embankment, made under Peter I in the 10s of the 18th century.

The excavations helped to discover the boundaries of the reservoir, which Peter I in one of his letters ordered “to bring out with a stone …”

Do the boundaries of the newly discovered reservoir correspond to the available graphical data? Only archives could answer this question. New searches have begun. They were conducted by employees of the Summer Garden. Blueprints and plans were found. One of the drawings ended up in Sweden: a copy was kindly sent to Leningrad by colleagues from the National Museum in Stockholm. Thus, it was possible to establish the true dimensions of the harbor (the excavation data completely coincided with them).

The question also arose – how did the “Havanese” adjoin the palace? Did the steps go down to the water directly from the main entrance, or, maybe, there was still a piece of land here? This was answered by the discovered plan-drawing of 1743. It turns out that the harbor was very close to the main entrance of the palace. On the western side, there was an embankment approaching the steps of the palace porch. From the eastern side, a ladder descended to the water, which washed the basement and the foundation of the entire eastern facade.
So, it became clear: before the researchers was the first embankment of Northern Palmyra, discovered by excavations today.

From the surviving documents it is known that it was decorated with a balustrade of wooden balusters. On the attic staircase of the palace, one can still see similar wooden balusters, turned by hand on a lathe.