Monument to Peter the Great

At the corner of Bolshoi and Maly Sampsonievsky Prospekts, opposite the Sampsonievsky Cathedral, stands a bronze figure of Peter the Great — the only monument to the emperor in this part of the city that is linked not to the founding of St Petersburg but to one of Russia's greatest military victories. A modern cast now stands on the pedestal, while the original sculpture is kept in the State Tretyakov Gallery.

The sculptor Mark Antokolsky created the model for the monument as early as 1872, but it took almost four decades before the design was cast in bronze and installed on this site. Funding for the casting and installation was provided by the Counts Sheremetev, descendants of Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev, who had commanded the Russian army at the Battle of Poltava. The bronze figure was cast in France, and the granite pedestal was designed by the architect Nikolai Lanceray, who had shortly before taken part in restoring the cathedral itself. The monument was unveiled on 27 June 1909, the two-hundredth anniversary of the Poltava victory, won by Russian forces precisely on the feast day of St Sampson the Hospitable, to whom the neighbouring church is dedicated.

The tsar is depicted full-length, about two and a half metres tall, in the campaign uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment with the Order of St Andrew the First-Called on his chest. In one hand he leans on a cane, in the other he holds a spyglass — a pose conveying the image of a commander observing the course of a battle rather than a triumphant figure on parade. The austere granite pedestal is free of decorative detail, underscoring the martial rather than ceremonial character of the image.

After the revolution the monument fell under the decree ordering the removal of monuments erected in honour of tsars, and it was dismantled in the 1930s. The figure was considered lost until 1939, when staff of the Tretyakov Gallery discovered it at one of the state metal-storage depots and secured its transfer into the museum's collection. For several decades the pedestal on Sampsonievsky Prospekt stood empty, while the sculpture itself was displayed as a museum piece of late-19th-century monumental sculpture.

The restored monument returned to its historic site on 24 May 2003, to mark St Petersburg's tercentenary. The new bronze cast repeats the composition of the original and stands on the same granite pedestal by Lanceray. Today the monument forms a single ensemble with the Sampsonievsky Cathedral and, nearby in Sampsonievsky Garden, the monument to the city's first architects, recalling the events that preceded St Petersburg's transformation into the capital of the empire.

The monument to Peter the Great by the Sampsonievsky Cathedral is a rare example of a monument dedicated not to the emperor's achievements as a city-builder but to his role as a military commander in a decisive battle of the Great Northern War. The story of its loss and recreation seven decades later makes the monument a vivid testament to how the city's relationship with its own past changed over the course of the 20th century.