Egyptian House

The apartment building at 23 Zakharyevskaya Street is known to locals as the Egyptian House, on account of its unusual facade decoration, though it is formally called the Nezhinskaya House, after the woman who commissioned it. It was built in 1911–1913 by the architect Marian Songailo for Alisa Nezhinskaya, wife of the lawyer and state councillor Alexander Nezhinsky. Before the revolution the building was let out to tenants, and it also housed the Belgian and Romanian embassies; the building was undamaged in the war, and later one of its apartments housed the editorial office of a magazine devoted to the art of the city on the Neva. Today it is an ordinary residential building with a café and offices on the ground floor.

In its proportions the building could be classified as Neoclassical — the style Songailo generally followed — but its lavish decoration on ancient Egyptian themes brings it closer to Art Nouveau; there are only two such apartment buildings in the city, the other standing on Zverinskaya Street. The facade is asymmetrical, yet two volumes accentuated by bay windows in the centre — around the main entrance and the carriage gates into the courtyard — create an illusion of symmetry. The centre and the right wing are marked by a row of columns whose capitals are carved in the shape of the head of the goddess Hathor — a motif the architect borrowed from the ancient temple at Dendera; in the left-hand section the same capitals crown not columns but flat pilasters.

The entrances to the main stairwells are guarded by statues of the sun god: their arms crossed over their chests, holding the ankh symbol, with a disc bearing the royal uraeus serpent atop their heads. Similar serpent figures also surround the medallions bearing the pharaoh's profile on the bay windows. The upper floors bear bas-reliefs repeating paintings from the burial chambers of ancient rulers, and the columns in the main entrance hall are modelled on the sanctuary of Isis on the island of Philae. The walls of the stairwells carry images of lotus flowers, lions, and deities of the Egyptian pantheon. The archway into the courtyard is decorated with winged sun discs and flying birds, and the courtyard continues the theme: by the lift are figures of a king and queen, and below them a frieze of ushabti, figurines that in tombs symbolically performed labour on behalf of the deceased. Such lavish decoration of a courtyard facade is unusual for the city's "well courtyards" — it was likely undertaken to attract tenants.

The house received the status of an identified heritage site in 2001, and in 2009 it was entered into the regional register of protected buildings. The 2007 restoration initially proceeded roughly, damaging the carved decoration with scaffolding, but after protests from heritage activists the methods were changed. In 2019 the mansion was included in the city's programme for restoring buildings with elaborate facades. Among Petersburgers, a legend lives on: a kiss beneath the archway of this house seals a union of lovers with the blessing of the Egyptian gods.