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Thursday, 12.07.2007
St. Isaac’s Cathedral
St. Isaac’s Cathedral, covering an area of over a hectare, and more than 100m high, is St. Petersburg’s largest church. The splendour that reigns inside the monumental building is difficult to express in words. The colonnade under its golden dome gives a unique view out over the city on all sides. This panorama view should be the starting point of your first tour of St. Petersburg.
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The Cathedral is named after St. Isaac of Dalmatia, not to honour his deeds, but purely because Peter the Great’s birthday fell on the saint’s festival, 30th May. Peter ordered the building of the first of the present-day St. Isaac’s three predecessors in 1707.
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All three, shortly after their completion, were regarded as being insufficiently imposing and replaced by new buildings. The French architect Auguste de Montferrand, when building the current cathedral 1818-1858, obviously wanted to ensure that his building would not share the same fate.
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| Address: |
Isaakievskaya Pl. 1
Nearest metro:
Nevsky Prospekt / Gostiny Dvor
Opening hours:
Museum: 10.30am – 8pm
Colonnade: 10.3am – 7.00pm
Closed: Wednesdays
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Regular church services stopped being held in the cathedral in 1928. Instead, the church, like many others, was converted into a Museum of Atheism. In contrast, however, to many others, the church survived the Communist period relatively unscathed. It remains a museum today: Instead of icons and altar candles, inside you can view models of the church and an exhibition about its history.
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The cathedral’s interior comprises an ensemble of splendid paintings, mosaics and frescos illuminated by pompous chandeliers each weighing three tons. Eyes dart from one part of the lavish decorations adorning the ceiling vaults and walls to another. The hectic activity within the cathedral is more reminiscent of a pedestrian zone than a cathedral.
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Even if you do decide against viewing the interior of the church (the admission charge is quite large) you should definitely climb the 262 steps to reach the dome-level viewing colonnade. From here you gain a truly magnificent panorama view.
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The majestic tones of Rakhmaninov and Tschaikovsky ring out between the dark-red granite pillars. Not always to everyone’s complete satisfaction: “Yes, I understand what you’re thinking,” says a warden in response to a visitor’s obvious irritation. “To start with I loved the music, but it plays incessantly from morning to evening and it’s simply too loud.” The splendour of the superb view over the roofs of St. Petersburg is immune to such minor irritations. To the right, on the far bank of the Neva, you see the star-shaped Peter and Paul Fortress. Then your eye will fall on the university embankment with the Kunstkammer, the academy of sciences and the main corpus of the Petersburg University, the 12 Colleges.
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Then the impressive Admiralty looms into view close up. Its long gold spire is one of the city’s main trademarks, - just as is the ‘Bronze Horseman’, the monument to Peter the Great in close proximity to St. Isaac’s. To the south, you see St. Isaac’s Square and heavy traffic circling round another mounted monument, to Tsar Nicholas I., and in the distance gleam the golden towers of the Nicholas Marin Cathedral.
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A few steps further along the colonnade and the world-famous architectural ensemble of the city centre lies at your feet: the green dome of Kazan Cathedral, the gaudy onion-shaped domes of the Christ Resurrection Church, and finally the enchanting façade of the Winter Palace.
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