Alexander Nevsky Lavra

The Holy Trinity Alexander Nevsky Lavra is the first and largest monastery in Saint Petersburg, founded by decree of Peter the Great in 1710 on the site where, according to legend, Prince Alexander Nevsky defeated the Swedes in the Battle of the Neva in 1240. The official founding date is considered to be 25 March 1713, the day the first wooden Church of the Annunciation was consecrated. The monastery's architectural ensemble was developed from 1715 under the direction of Domenico Trezzini as a symmetrical complex of stone buildings between the Neva and the Chyornaya River, later renamed the Monastyrka; at the same time the monastery served as an outpost guarding the southeastern approaches to the new capital.

In 1723 Peter the Great ordered the relics of the holy prince Alexander Nevsky to be transferred to the monastery from Vladimir; the ceremony took place in 1724 and has since been marked every year as a separate church feast. From the 1720s the monastery housed a theological seminary, later transformed into a theological academy that trained many generations of Russian Orthodox clergy. The monastery received the status of lavra — the highest monastic rank — in 1797 by decree of Emperor Paul I. The ensemble's main cathedral, the Trinity Cathedral, was rebuilt to a design by the architect Ivan Starov in the second half of the 18th century and became one of the finest examples of early Neoclassicism in Russian church architecture.

The Lavra is famous for its historic 18th- and 19th-century necropolises — the Lazarevskoye and Tikhvin cemeteries — where outstanding figures of Russian culture and science are buried, among them Mikhail Lomonosov, Alexander Suvorov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Mikhail Glinka. Every year on 12 September, the day of the transfer of Prince Alexander Nevsky's relics, a citywide religious procession sets out from the monastery walls along Nevsky Prospect, drawing thousands of believers.

After the revolution the monastery was closed and its clergy subjected to repression, but since the 1990s it has gradually been returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. Today the Alexander Nevsky Lavra is a working monastery for monks and, at the same time, an architectural monument of federal significance, standing at the eastern end of Nevsky Prospect.