Razumnoye is a village on the small Razumenka river, 7 km from Belgorod, in the former Belgorod district of the Kursk province. The Dorogobuzhinov estate stood there: Antonina Ippolitovna, the second wife of Philippe d'Horrer, and her son Vladimir lived there, and both were buried there.
The Dorogobuzhinovs
Antonina's brother, Vladimir Ippolitovich Dorogobuzhinov (1822–1888), had a long career: an official of the Naval Ministry, he cared for hospitals and the wounded during the Crimean War, was the first Russian consul in Jerusalem, where he bought the first plots for the Russian hospices near the Jaffa Gate, and then governor of Kostroma for almost twelve years. Retired to Razumnoye, he brought up his nephew Vladimir d'Horrer and did much for the village: the new church, built in 1884 according to the villagers, a school and the Dorogobuzhinov-d'Horrer family crypt are attributed to him1.
Antonina Ippolitovna, born in 1824, died on 6 July 1893 and was most likely buried in the family enclosure near the church. Her son, Count Vladimir d'Horrer, inherited the estate — some 14 km² — and was buried there in 1909, in a separate tomb of the family crypt. His life is told in the chapter Philippe and Vladimir d'Horrer.
The disappearance of the estate
The crypt was probably looted in the 1920s and later used as a silage pit. During the German occupation the church served as a granary; badly damaged in 1943, the year of the battle of Kursk, it was then blown up and its stones used for building. Nothing remains today of the church, the crypt or the house.
Antonina's gravestone
In 2023 a family of Razumnoye, pulling down an old burnt house built in 1945, found pieces of a granite slab in its foundations. After a rain, letters appeared, among them the patronymic « Ипполитовна » (Ippolitovna), and a cross on another fragment: it was the gravestone of Countess Antonina Ippolitovna Dorrer. The local historian Oleg Bavykin hopes to join the fragments and set them up near the present church of Razumnoye. The journalist Anna Cherkashina told the story of the find and photographed the stone in the newspaper Belgorodskaya Pravda: "The mystery of the countess's gravestone" (19 September 2023, in Russian).
Notes
- 1Source: A. Cherkashina, « Тайна графского надгробия. Что обнаружили при разборе старого дома в Разумном », Белгородская правда (belpressa.ru), 19 September 2023. The article spells the name « Дорогобужинов »; the Russian online encyclopedia spells it « Доргобужинов » (Dorgobuzhinov).