Ice Palace

Prince Mikhail Alekseevich Golitsyn of Russia offended Empress Anna Ivanovna by marrying an Italian woman. After his wife died, the Empress had a giant ice palace built, replete with ice sculptures and even ice cannon in St. Petersburg in 1739. She had the prince dressed as a jester and forcibly married him to an ugly peasant woman in a big mock-ceremony, attended by animals and circus freaks. She then shut them naked into an icy chamber to freeze them to death. They survived only because the prince's new wife managed to bribe a guard for a coat.