Dacha Kvitko

This majestic and beautiful palace stands on a cliff overlooking the Black Sea in Sochi. It originally belonged to a wealthy tsarist colonel, Andrey Valerianovich Kvitko. He had married an Italian woman, whose wealthy family had two big mansions in Italy. Together they moved to a prestigious Khosta area in Sochi, where Kvitko built the family a new mansion. It was completed in 1916, and said to be an exact copy of one of his wife's family mansions, only two to three times smaller in size.

The family kept the mansion for only a short time. After the revolution started in in 1917, the family fled to Italy and the state took over the complex. First it was turned to a colony for difficult teenagers, then a holiday home. During World War II it was used as a hospital, and then as a sanatorium.

Renovation works started at the end of the 1980s, but the money vanished with the Soviet state collapsed, leaving the home without a roof. The rest was left to nature and looters.

Officials have planned to renovate the mansion to its former glory, but considering the huge investment it will require, nothing has happened yet.