Church of Our Lady of Lourdes

On Kovensky Lane, in the Liteiny district, stands the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lourdes — the only church in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg built for the city's French Catholic community. The building combines Romanesque massiveness with the influence of Nordic Art Nouveau, and it remains an active parish to this day.

St Petersburg's French colony had long worshipped at the Church of St Catherine on Nevsky Prospekt, but by the end of the nineteenth century had outgrown it. Petitions for a church of their own began as early as the 1860s, though the authorities did not grant permission until 1898. A plot on Kovensky Lane was purchased for 67,000 roubles, and in 1900 a temporary wooden church was erected on it. The design for a stone church was drawn up by the architect Leonty Benois: he initially envisaged a three-nave Romanesque basilica with a freestanding brick-and-stone bell tower. Construction began in 1903.

The plans had to be changed when the French firm Batignolles, which was building the Trinity Bridge across the Neva, donated its surplus granite to the parish. Benois, together with his assistant Marian Peretyatkovich, reworked the design: instead of three naves with columns, they created a single reinforced-concrete vault, while the façade was clad in granite. The resulting sharp-edged volume recalls not medieval France but the buildings of Finnish Art Nouveau in the style of Eliel Saarinen. A thirty-metre faceted bell tower topped with a dome rises above the building, and the façade is crowned with a gabled pediment.

The church was consecrated on 5 December 1909 by Bishop Jan Cieplak. Inside, seashells for holy water were placed at the entrance, along with fourteen images of the Way of the Cross, a marble bust of Christ by the sculptor Fyodorov, and an altarpiece by the artist Ernest Lipgart, which in 1916 replaced an earlier copy of a Raphael Madonna. Later a German pipe organ by the firm Walcker, built in 1910, was installed in the church.

From 1938 to 1992 the church remained the only active Catholic parish in Leningrad. In 1966, during his visit to the city, President Charles de Gaulle of France visited the church. The building was repeatedly renovated: in the late 1940s and in the 1960s the columns were finished to imitate marble, and Latvian craftsmen painted the vaults and walls.

In the 1990s the parish carried out a major renovation: the basement level was cleared, a new altar and pews were installed, and stained-glass windows with mosaic decoration were made by the artists Isabella and Mikhail Baikov. In 2009 the community marked the centenary of the church's consecration. Today the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes continues to welcome parishioners and remains one of the few reminders of the once-large French diaspora of the pre-revolutionary capital, while its appearance — unusual for an Orthodox city — draws the attention of passers-by on a quiet St Petersburg street.