Pel and Sons Pharmacy

At the corner of the 7th Line and Dneprovsky Lane on Vasilyevsky Island stands an apartment building housing the Pel and Sons Pharmacy — one of St Petersburg's oldest still-operating pharmacies, whose history dates back to the mid-eighteenth century. Under the Pel family, this modest pharmacy grew into an entire pharmaceutical complex with a laboratory, a factory and a scientific library, and the building itself retains Art Nouveau decoration rare for the city.

In 1850 the pharmacy was bought by Wilhelm Pel, a native of Dorpat who took the Russified name Vasily Vasilyevich, and he equipped it with his own chemical laboratory. His methods, unusual for the time, and his flair for showmanship — such as gilded pills in ornate boxes — earned him a reputation among his island neighbours as an eccentric, almost an alchemist. His son Alexander Pel inherited the business, earning a master's degree in pharmacy by 1875; he replaced his father's artistry with precise calculation, installed granulators and tablet-pressing machines, and turned the family enterprise into an advanced pharmaceutical production facility.

The present corner building housing the pharmacy was erected in 1907–1910 to a design by the architect Zinovy Levy and the engineer Konstantin Niman, who added three storeys and an attic to the earlier house. The Art Nouveau façade is adorned with two domed bay windows, mosaic panels from Viktor Frolov's workshop, and heraldic cartouches featuring a lion, a griffin and a unicorn beneath the motto "Ora et labora" — "pray and work." Construction was completed only after Alexander Pel's death; he died in Berlin in 1908 while attending a conference on thalassotherapy.

Under Alexander Pel's leadership the pharmacy became a supplier to the imperial court, and the complex united under one roof a chemical laboratory, a medicine-manufacturing factory, raw-material warehouses and its own scientific library with a herbarium collection. Pel was the first in Russia to use ampoules for sterile injections and to establish the production of precisely dosed medicines, and his preparation "Pel's Spermin" became well known even beyond Russia's borders. The scientist corresponded with Dmitri Mendeleev and published his own "Journal of Medical Chemistry and Organotherapy." His grandson Alfred carried on the business, opening an institute of organotherapy at the pharmacy that was awarded a gold medal at the 1913 All-Russian Hygiene Exhibition; the factory continued operating until 1927.

Following a restoration in 1983, a museum of the history of Russian pharmacy opened in the building, and in 2010 the trading hall was recreated in its early-twentieth-century appearance, complete with genuine pharmacy items, scales and preparations from the Pel era. Today the building combines a working pharmacy with a museum display that draws tourists alongside the famous "Griffin Tower" in the neighbouring courtyard.

The Pel and Sons Pharmacy remains a monument not only to St Petersburg Art Nouveau but also to the history of Russian pharmaceutical science — the complex of laboratories and production facilities created by the family at the turn of the twentieth century was in many ways ahead of its time. The surviving interior and museum collection allow visitors to see what an advanced pharmacy of the imperial capital once looked like.