Ploshchad Vosstaniya (Uprising Square)

Where Nevsky Prospekt meets Ligovsky Prospekt and Goncharnaya Street lies one of St Petersburg's main squares. Until 1918 it was called Znamenskaya Square, after the church of the same name, and it received its current name in memory of the popular uprisings of February and October 1917. Here the station forecourt and the city's main thoroughfare converge, making the square one of the busiest hubs in the city.

The area took shape in the 1840s to a design by the architect Nikolai Yefimov, when the railway linking St Petersburg with Moscow was being built; previously the Ligovsky Canal, later filled in, flowed here, separating the station plot from the square in front of the church. On the bank of the canal, in the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, stood the "Elephant Yard", a menagerie of exotic animals, an episode from whose life is captured in a well-known fable by Ivan Krylov. By 1851 the building of Nikolaevsky Station had been erected to a design by Konstantin Ton, and beside it a four-storey hotel, later named the "Oktyabrskaya".

In 1909 a monument to Alexander III by the sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy was installed on the square; it was dismantled in 1937 and later moved to the courtyard of the Marble Palace. The square's present-day vertical dominant is a thirty-six-metre granite obelisk, "To the Hero City of Leningrad", unveiled on 8 May 1985 to a design by the architects Valentin Lukyanov and Anatoly Alymov. The monolithic shaft, weighing three hundred and sixty tonnes — the largest such block installed in the city since the Alexander Column — is adorned with a bronze wreath of Glory and high reliefs depicting scenes of the war years, and the gold star at its summit echoes the little ship on the spire of the Admiralty.

During the war years long-term firing points were built on the square, and from the station platforms the last trains departed carrying evacuated children and factory equipment. Construction of the metro, begun before the war, resumed in the 1950s: the above-ground pavilion of the "Ploshchad Vosstaniya" station, with bas-reliefs devoted to the events of 1917, opened in 1955. At the same time, on the site of a former military fortification, a public garden was laid out with the "Dolphin" fountain by the architect Thomas de Thomon.

Since 2013 the "Immortal Regiment" procession has set off from the obelisk every 9 May. In 2007 a project for a large-scale underground reconstruction of the square, with a shopping complex and parking, was presented, but it was never carried out — experts pointed to the risk of disrupting the historic ensemble.

Today Ploshchad Vosstaniya remains the city's main gateway from the side of Moscow and St Petersburg's largest transport hub, preserving its nineteenth-century historic buildings and the memory of the revolutionary events and the defence of besieged Leningrad.