Sightseeing

St.Isaac’s Cathedral, which is considered to be one of the most magnificent monuments of the Russian architecture of the middle of the 19th century, forms a part of the grand ensemble of our city, dominating the vast territory of a well-shaped square that got it name. St.Isaac’s Cathedral is the forth cathedral in the world considering the size of its dome, after St.Peter’s cathedral in Vatican, St.Paul’s in London and Santa Maria de Flores in Florence; it also occupied the third place among the world’s cathedrals according to its height – 101, meters (approximately 380 feet). The history of construction of St.Isaac’s Cathedral dates back to the 18th century, when the wooden Church of St.Isaac’s of Dalmatia, popularly known as the Admiralty Church, rose in 1710 on the present-day site of the Bronze Horseman. The church was consecrated on the 30th May (this day is regarded by the Orthodox Church to be the day of St.Isaac – hence the name of the cathedral) to the order of Peter the Great, who specially worshiped St.Isaac as he was born on that saint’s day. Up to the beginning of the 19th century, the cathedral was reconstructed several times: in 1717 the church was rebuilt in stone; in 1768 Catherine the Great commissioned architect Rinaldi to erect a new cathedral on the south edge of the square to clean the site for a monument to Peter; and during the reign of Paul I the construction site was repeatedly robbed of columns and marble slabs to be used for Mikhailovsky Castle. In 1818 young French architect August Monferrand was commissioned to start the construction from scratch and it took him 40 years to complete the task. The building turned out to be extremely valuable and interesting for its architecture, art and construction techniques used to erect it: at first the ground was fortified with 11 000 pinewood piles, then they passed to the porticos decorated with 48 columns made of red granite 17 meters high and 114 tons each, which were lifted with the help of an original system of winches. It’s remarkable that it took 128 workmen only 45 minutes to raise 1 column using that system. After all the porticos were accomplished the walls 2,5 to 5 meters thick were built. Then the unique work on the creating the dome started. All its 3 parts are made of metal and that was rare for that time. The outer part of the dome is covered with the gilded copper sheets and due to the original method (gold was mixed with mercury) it was gilded only once. According to the Western Europe tradition to bury the architect inside his creation, Monferrand asked for a permission to be buried inside St.Isaac’s cathedral that took almost his life to built, but his request was declined and when the architect died, his widow took his body to France where his tomb was lost.

Entry price

from 20.00 $