Peter and Paul Cathedral

At the very heart of the Peter and Paul Fortress stands the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul — the burial vault of Russia's monarchs and one of the chief monuments of Petrine Baroque. Construction ran from 1712 to 1733 to a design by the architect Domenico Trezzini, and for almost two and a half centuries — from 1733 to 1962 — the cathedral remained the tallest building in the city, holding the record for all of Russia until 1952.

On the orders of Peter the Great, construction began not with the church itself but with the bell tower: the tsar wanted the new structure to rise higher than the bell tower of Ivan the Great in Moscow. Owing to a shortage of labourers the bell tower was not finished until 1720, and the whole cathedral only after the emperor's death, by 1733. A wooden church, consecrated back in 1704, continued to hold services inside the rising stone walls. The spire did not acquire its present shape all at once: after the fire of 1756 and the storm of 1777 it was repeatedly repaired, and in 1830 the roofer Pyotr Telushkin became famous for climbing to the top to mend the angel figure without any scaffolding at all. In 1857–1858 the wooden structures were replaced with metal ones to calculations by the engineer Dmitry Zhuravsky, which added nearly ten more metres to the building's height.

The cathedral was built on the model of a Western European basilica — an elongated rectangular building 61 metres long and 27.5 metres wide, quite unlike the traditional cross-domed churches of Russia. The dominant feature of the building is the bell tower on the west façade, with a gilded spire crowned by a figure of an angel holding a cross: the figure stands 3.2 metres tall, has a wingspan of 3.8 metres, and weighs about 250 kilograms. The bell tower holds more than a hundred bells and a carillon. Inside, visitors are struck by the carved, gilded iconostasis almost twenty metres high, made by Moscow craftsmen in the 1720s and transported to the new capital piece by piece.

Since 1725 the cathedral has served as the ancestral burial vault of the House of Romanov: almost every Russian emperor and empress is buried here, with the exception of Peter II, who died in Moscow, and Ivan VI, whose burial place is unknown. In 1865 the assorted gravestones were replaced with matching white marble sarcophagi topped with gilded crosses. In 1998 the remains attributed to Nicholas II and his family were reinterred in the Chapel of St. Catherine, and in 2006 the remains of Empress Maria Feodorovna, who had died in Denmark, were brought here as well. A gallery links the cathedral to a separate burial vault for other members of the imperial family.

After the revolution the cathedral was closed in 1919 and turned into a museum in 1924, with part of its treasures transferred to other collections. The building suffered during the war; the façades were restored by 1952 and the interiors by 1957, and since 1954 the cathedral has been under the care of the Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg. Since the 1990s memorial services for the emperors have again been held here, and regular church services have taken place since 2000.

Today the cathedral remains both a working museum site and a monument of federal significance: its golden spire with the angel is one of the chief symbols of the city's skyline, while the burial vault preserves the memory of three centuries of the Russian monarchy.