Famous Landmarks in Saint Petersburg

Winter Palace

1754–1762 · Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli

Painted green and white in the Baroque style of its era, its facade runs the length of a monumental square beside the river embankment, the whole complex covering some fourteen hectares.

The Winter Palace served as the official residence of the House of Romanov from 1732 to 1917, though the building standing today, designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in the Elizabethan Baroque style, was completed in 1762. A fire severely damaged it in 1837, and reconstruction followed almost immediately. By the late nineteenth century the emperors governed roughly a sixth of the world's land and 125 million subjects from inside it. Revolutionaries stormed the palace in 1917, an event later restaged in a 1928 film. The palace and its grounds now form the Hermitage Museum.

• It has been calculated to contain 1,886 doors, 1,945 windows, 1,500 rooms and 117 staircases.
• The current building is the fourth Winter Palace raised on or beside this spot, next to the site of the very first, more modest one.
• Its 1917 storming was re-enacted, more dramatically than it happened, in Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film October.

Photo: W. Bulach (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood

1883–1907 · Alfred Parland

Its Russian Revival style sets it apart from the Baroque and Neoclassical landmarks nearby, a design that looked back to older Russian church architecture rather than following the same classical language.

Built between 1883 and 1907 by Alfred Parland in the Russian Revival style, this Russian Orthodox church stands on the exact spot where members of the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya assassinated Emperor Alexander II in March 1881. The Romanov imperial family funded its construction in his memory, which is where its name comes from. Today it functions simultaneously as a secular museum and an active place of worship, and remains one of the city's most visited sites.

• It still functions as both a secular museum and an active place of worship at the same time.

Photo: AndreyWi (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Saint Isaac's Cathedral

1818–1858 · Auguste de Montferrand

A large-scale Neoclassical cathedral, its size and prevailing use as a museum today setting it apart from the smaller parish churches around it.

Constructed between 1818 and 1858 to Auguste de Montferrand's design, in the Neoclassical style, Saint Isaac's Cathedral is dedicated to Saint Isaac of Dalmatia, whose feast day coincided with the birth of Peter the Great. The Soviet government converted it into a museum in 1931, and it has remained one ever since, though occasional services have resumed in a side chapel since the 1990s. In 2017 the city's governor proposed handing it back to the Russian Orthodox Church, but public protests blocked the transfer.

• It is dedicated to Saint Isaac of Dalmatia only because that saint's feast day happened to fall on Peter the Great's birthday.
• Its architect, Auguste de Montferrand, died in 1858, the same year construction finally finished after four decades.
• In 2017 the city's governor tried to hand it back to the Orthodox Church, but public protest stopped the transfer.

Photo: Florstein (Telegram:WikiPhoto.Space) (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Peter and Paul Fortress

1706–1740 · Domenico Trezzini

Its ramparts form a six-pointed star, a fortification shape designed to give defenders overlapping lines of cannon fire along every wall.

Peter the Great founded this fortress in 1703, but the star-shaped structure seen today was built to Domenico Trezzini's designs between 1706 and 1740. For roughly two centuries, from the early eighteenth century until the early 1920s, it held political prisoners rather than serving any military purpose. It has operated as a museum since 1924, and is considered the city's original citadel, the point from which Saint Petersburg grew.

Photo: W. Bulach (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Kazan Cathedral

1801–1811 · Andrey Voronikhin

A Neoclassical cathedral in the Empire style, standing directly on Nevsky Prospekt in the heart of the city.

Built between 1801 and 1811 to Andrey Voronikhin's designs in the Empire style, Kazan Cathedral stands on Nevsky Prospekt and belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church. It takes its name from the icon of Our Lady of Kazan to which it is dedicated, one of the most venerated icons in the country. Voronikhin died in 1814, only a few years after the cathedral's completion. It is now protected as a federal cultural heritage site.

Photo: A.Savin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Nevsky Prospect

1710s

The avenue runs dead straight for about 4.5 kilometres and only around 20 metres wide, linking a riverside government building at one end to a monastery at the other, with a slight kink partway along marking where its two separately surveyed halves were joined.

Nevsky Prospect grew from two separate clearings cut through swampy forest: one leading from the Admiralty, the other from a monastery founded on the Neva around 1710. Laid out on Peter I's orders as the start of the road toward Novgorod and Moscow, the two stretches were surveyed independently, which is why the avenue still bends slightly where they meet. Drainage ditches and log fascines carried the road over the bog. By the 1720s it was paved, lined with birches, and lit with oil lamps, the first street in Russia to have street lighting.

• Anyone caught felling trees in the strip of forest bordering the empress's gardens along the road risked being beaten with a stick called a batog.
• A crossing over the Moika River marked the city's official customs border from 1703 to 1726, where taxes were collected from arrivals.

Photo: Florstein (Telegram:WikiPhoto.Space) (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Bronze Horseman

1770–1782 · Étienne Maurice Falconet

The bronze rider and rearing horse balance on only the horse's hind legs and tail, a serpent trampled beneath them, mounted on a single raw granite boulder rather than a built pedestal, the whole monument about 13 metres tall.

Catherine the Great commissioned this equestrian monument from French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, who arrived in Russia in 1766; the tsar's face was modelled separately by his apprentice Marie-Anne Collot from a death mask. Casting began in 1775 and nearly failed when the mould broke and started fires, saved only because caster Emelyan Khailov stayed to salvage it. The pedestal is a single granite boulder found at Lakhta in 1768 and dragged to the site on a system of bronze balls. Sandbags protected the statue through the Siege of Leningrad, and it later inspired an 1833 poem by Alexander Pushkin.

• The statue's right hand was modelled on an ancient Roman bronze hand excavated in the Netherlands in 1771.
• A nineteenth-century legend held that the city could not be conquered as long as the statue stood in place, which is why it was sandbagged during the wartime siege.
• The sculptor left Russia four years before the monument he designed was finished, after a falling-out with Catherine, and was not present at its 1782 unveiling.

Photo: Florstein (Telegram:WikiPhoto.Space) (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Saint Michael's Castle

1797–1801 · Vincenzo Brenna

Each of the building's four facades borrows a different historical style, from a triumphal-arch motif on the south front to Italian Renaissance and Gothic detailing elsewhere, unified by rounded corners around an octagonal inner courtyard that originally sat on an artificial island ringed by two rivers and two purpose-dug canals.

Emperor Paul I had this castle built between 1797 and 1801 to designs by Vincenzo Brenna and Vasily Bazhenov, replacing a wooden palace there and named for the archangel, the Romanov family's patron saint. Distrustful of the Winter Palace, Paul set it on an artificial island ringed by two rivers and two dug canals, reachable only by drawbridge, yet was assassinated in his bedroom forty nights after moving in. The family abandoned it afterward; in 1823 it passed to an army engineering school, and since the early 1990s it has housed a branch of the Russian Museum.

• The bronze equestrian statue standing in front of the castle had been cast decades earlier, during Peter the Great's own lifetime, though the casting was not finished until 1747.
• Its pedestal is inscribed 'From Great Grandson to Great Grandfather' and decorated with bas-reliefs of two Russian victories over Sweden.
• The octagonal shape of its inner courtyard echoes early Christian baptisteries as much as it does Italian Renaissance palace design.

Photo: Florstein (Telegram:WikiPhoto.Space) (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Singer House

1902–1904 · Pavel Suzor

Pink and gray polished granite sheathes a six-story building capped by a glass tower and dome, ending in a glass globe once wrapped in a gilded band bearing the sewing-machine company's name; bronze valkyrie figures decorate the facade, and two glazed atriums light the interior.

Built in 1902–1904 by architect Pavel Suzor for the Russian headquarters of an American sewing-machine company, this six-story Art Nouveau building stands opposite Kazan Cathedral. Barred by height codes from rising above the Winter Palace, Suzor topped it instead with a glass-domed tower crowned by a globe once wrapped in a gilded company nameplate. The facades are faced in polished pink and gray granite, with bronze valkyries and, until they vanished in the 1920s, a bronze eagle beneath the globe. Nationalized after the 1917 revolution, it became the city's main bookshop in 1938, staying open through the wartime siege.

• The company had wanted a skyscraper like its new headquarters then rising in New York, but local codes capped the height at that of the Winter Palace, so Suzor added the glass-domed tower to compensate.
• When a 1941 bomb hit a neighboring building, the blast wave shattered the bookshop's windows; staff simply boarded them up and kept the store open through the rest of the wartime siege.
• Contemporary critics were unkind: one prominent architect compared the dome to a perfume bottle, and even Suzor's own former student called the building dull and unremarkable.

Photo: Екатерина Борисова (CC BY-SA 4.0)