Griffin Tower

In the well-like courtyard of house number 18 on the 7th Line of Vasilyevsky Island, behind the façade of the Pel pharmacy, hides a brick structure roughly 11 metres high — the "Griffin Tower," sometimes also called the "digit tower." Formally it is nothing more than the remains of a chimney, but through its silhouette and its reputation it has long become one of St Petersburg's most unusual sights: a place where people come to make a wish.

The chimney was built in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Wilhelm Pel, the owner of the neighbouring pharmacy, was rebuilding his premises and equipping them with a chemical laboratory: the narrow brick structure served as a ventilation flue for laboratory fumes, not as a decorative feature of the courtyard. The chimney's unconventional appearance, tucked away inside a well-like courtyard, combined with the reputation of the apothecary himself — regarded by his neighbours as an eccentric natural scientist — gave rise to a whole array of romantic legends surrounding the structure. According to contemporaries, the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev was a frequent guest of Pel's.

The tower has neither windows nor doors, is about two metres in diameter, and is topped with a tin roof. On 1 May 1994 the artist Alexei Kostroma and a group of like-minded friends fixed a huge egg to the top, set in a cardboard nest, and at the same time numbered every brick in the structure — hence the tower's other name, the "digit tower." The egg was repeatedly thrown down and put back, and today it has been lost altogether, but the numbering of the bricks and the chaotic inscriptions on the brickwork survive: unknown visitors keep adding new numbers and writings to the tower.

City legend holds that Pel's secrets were guarded by griffins that dwelt at the top of the chimney: supposedly, in his secret laboratory, he tried to turn mercury into gold and even discovered a "formula for happiness." According to another version, the invisible griffins can still be spotted today, but only at night — by day they hide from sunlight, circling above the city and guarding the apothecary's secret. It is believed that the courtyard beneath the tower can dramatically change a visitor's fate for the better, which is why, for decades, both residents and tourists from across the city have come here to make a wish.

In 2009 the chimney was restored, but its growing popularity turned into a problem: crowds of tourists created round-the-clock noise, and some visitors behaved inappropriately and damaged the brickwork. In 2010 residents blocked access to the courtyard, and in a vote 78.9 percent came out in favour of demolishing the tower to make way for parking spaces. The news stirred up the city, but the municipal authorities denied rumours of an impending demolition and confirmed that the chimney was listed as an identified object of cultural heritage. Journalists wrote, not without irony, that the true guardians of the secret formula for happiness had turned out to be elderly opponents of the monument's preservation.

The story of the Griffin Tower shows how an ordinary piece of engineering — a ventilation chimney for a chemical laboratory — was transformed, through urban folklore and street art, into a cult destination whose significance has long outgrown its original utilitarian purpose. Today it stands as a rare example of a St Petersburg landmark that thrives not for its architectural value, but purely on the strength of legend.