Saint Isaac's Cathedral

Saint Isaac's Cathedral is the largest Orthodox church in Saint Petersburg, consecrated in honour of Saint Isaac of Dalmatia, the saint on whose feast day Peter the Great was born. The present building is already the fourth church in the city dedicated to this saint; the first, a wooden church, was built for the workers of the Admiralty in 1710, and it was there, in 1712, that Peter the Great married Catherine Alekseyevna. The present cathedral was built to the design of the French architect Auguste de Montferrand between 1818 and 1858 — construction took forty years and was personally overseen by Nicholas I. The building is considered one of the last major works of the Classical style and was built using engineering solutions that were innovative for their time: thousands of piles were driven into the foundation, and the granite columns of the porticoes — monoliths weighing more than a hundred tonnes each — were raised using specially designed scaffolding.

The cathedral stands 101.5 metres high, measures 111.3 metres in length including the porticoes, and 97.6 metres in width. The building is adorned with 112 monolithic granite columns of various sizes, and its walls are faced with pale grey Ruskeala marble. The dome, visible from almost any point in the historic centre, is covered in genuine gold. The cathedral's interior decoration is notable for its use of precious and ornamental stones — malachite and lapis lazuli; it also houses one of Russia's largest collections of monumental painting and mosaic — craftsmen worked on the sixty-two mosaic panels, which reproduce the painted images, right up until the beginning of the First World War.

The solemn consecration of the cathedral took place on 30 May 1858. From 1858 to 1929 it served as the cathedral church of the Diocese of Saint Petersburg, and from 1928 it was given the status of a museum — in the 1930s a Foucault pendulum, demonstrating the Earth's rotation, was even suspended beneath its dome. During the Siege of Leningrad, the dome and spires were painted over with protective camouflage, and the cathedral's basements were used to store museum treasures from the suburban palaces. Regular services have resumed in the cathedral since 1991, while the building retains its status as a museum — the State Museum-Monument "Saint Isaac's Cathedral."