While there are not many detailed plans, maps, reference books, and guides of early 20th century Sochi available, they still help to partially reconstruct the history of one of the most interesting buildings in terms of urban development — Villa Vera.
The villa is located on the former lands of Nikolay Nikolayevich Mamontov — a 1st guild merchant, industrialist, and hereditary honorary citizen of Moscow. Mamontov was one of the largest landowners in the Sochi region during the last third of the 19th century, owning vast tracts of land near the Agura River, situated between the Sochi and Psakho rivers. In October 1872, he acquired a plot of 2,700 dessiatines in the upper part of Sochi and invited Reinhold Garbe, a skilled practitioner who thoroughly studied economic management in the south, to serve as his estate manager. That autumn, a house was constructed with a gable roof made of pine wood, plastered both inside and out. According to contemporaries, the house was “quite decent and spacious, but not luxurious, lacking any pretentious embellishments that typically disguise the rough patches of our suburban Moscow dachas.” The house was named Villa Vera in honor of the heiress of the eminent Mamontov merchant family.
Later, the estate passed into the possession of the heirs of Nikolay Mamontov. Maps of the first decade of the 20th century indicate that those lands belonged to Marina Aleksandrovna Kostaryova, the wife of Nikolay Anatolyevich Kostaryov, the city mayor of Sochi. In 1910, a new building was constructed on the site of the old wooden one from locally sourced natural sandstone and brick. It was erected by its new owner Nikolay Kostaryov. The land and the old building came into his possession as a dowry, and he significantly rebuilt the estate, expanded the park, and built a new stone two-story house. Vera was a family name in the Mamontov dynasty, and that could explain why the new building retained its old name — Villa Vera.
The Museum of the History of the Resort City of Sochi presents a marble table “Sirens” — one of the interior elements of the second version of Villa Vera. Such tables were produced at the Peterhof Lapidary Factory and could be found in many aristocratic houses of Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw and Kyiv in the early 20th century.
