Dutch Church (Dutch Reformed Church)

At the intersection of Nevsky Prospect, the Moika Embankment, and Bolshaya Konyushennaya Street stands a late-Classicist building known as the Dutch Church. The landmark combines a church rotunda with residential wings into a single architectural block and for almost two centuries has remained one of the recognizable buildings of the city's central district.

The Dutch community appeared in St. Petersburg at the very start of the 18th century, in large part thanks to Peter the Great's personal sympathy for the Netherlands. As early as 1708 the Dutch were able to worship in a small wooden church at the court of Vice-Admiral Cornelius Cruys, and nine years later the community, then numbering only about thirty people, acquired its own pastor. The plot on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Moika was purchased by the community in the 1730s; the buildings standing there burned down and were rebuilt more than once, and the prayer hall remained cramped for a long time, matching neither the size of the congregation nor the appearance of the grand avenue being built up around it. An attempt by the architect Georg Christoph Kreber to erect a new, more representative church on the site at the end of the 18th century remained only on paper.

The matter was resolved radically only in 1830, when it was decided to rebuild the entire plot as a single complex. The project was entrusted to the architect Pavel Jacquot, who united the church and the adjoining apartment buildings in a single, symmetrical composition; construction was completed in 1837–1839. On the side facing Nevsky Prospect the building is marked by a Corinthian portico with four massive white columns. The church itself was designed in the form of a rotunda beneath a shallow dome: a round hall on the second floor, decorated with paired columns of the same order, held around four hundred worshippers.

Even before the revolution the building led a rich cultural life not directly tied to worship: it housed Bellizard's bookshop, in 1837 the first art lottery in Russia was held here, regular exhibitions were organized, and in 1839–1841 the building housed the editorial office of Andrei Krayevsky's journal Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), where the critic Vissarion Belinsky worked and Zhukovsky and Odoevsky were published.

After the revolution the congregation dwindled, services ceased in 1926, and a year later the church was closed and nationalized; the organ was handed over to the Capella, and the premises were taken over first by a puppet theater and then by a drama theater. A fire in 1936 destroyed part of the interiors, after which a city library opened in the building. Later a Society of Free Artists arose on its basis, and after another major fire in 2004 and subsequent repairs the space acquired its present name — the "Nevsky, 20" Art and Music Center of the Mayakovsky Library, whose main exhibition venue is precisely the church rotunda.

Today the building houses exhibition halls, a café, and cultural spaces side by side, and the structure itself remains a protected architectural monument — in 2020 the unauthorized removal of the historic balcony railings even led to a criminal case for violating the appearance of a heritage site.