Due to an early injury as a child, he was unable to start school until he was eleven years old. From a late bloomer to a Nobel Prize winnerīorn in 1849 in what was still the Russian Empire, Pavlov was the eldest of eleven children raised by a Russian orthodox priest and his wife. Aktuganova, the curator of a new permanent exhibition of art and science located in the basement of Pavlov’s historical lab, shares that it was the scientist himself who developed this land from a loose hamlet, once inhabited by the Finnish diaspora, into the country’s first official academic village. I had no idea before coming to Koltushi that the same hands that rang bells for dogs also cultivated whole orchards of apple trees, or that young chimpanzees used to clamor here between the trees and busts of scientists like Decartes, Mendel or Sechenov. Ivan Pavlov (second right) in his laboratory. Or how he survived the revolution, for that matter. Little is mentioned of the pond where the aging researcher would swim every morning, or the banya where he’d invite guests for a good sweat, or about the beloved bicycle he bought in Sweden before Lenin’s revolution. In fact, they might not even think about the man at all – a strange fate for a scientist whose name appears in high school textbooks the world over. When foreigners think of Ivan Pavlov, they’re more likely to think of his experiments with dogs than the parks he cultivated. My guide, Irina Aktuganova, continues that not many would know that the wooden buildings scattered through the greenery form part of the region’s UNESCO-protected heritage, an extended monument to Russia’s most famous scientist and first Nobel Laureate: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. I’m there on a Saturday, and many are taking a stroll with family or friends. Petersburg, are little aware of who planted the trees in the town’s beloved park. I’m told that the denizens of Koltushi, nestled just twenty kilometers outside St.