Railings of the Mikhailovsky Garden

Along the Griboyedov Canal, next to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, runs the wrought-iron railing of the Mikhailovsky Garden — one of the most famous works of Art Nouveau decorative art in Saint Petersburg. The railing's plant-motif ornamentation echoes the decoration of the church itself, and it has long since become a landmark in its own right, on a par with the cathedral.

The railing was forged in 1903–1907, at the same time as the construction of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ; funding for the work was provided by the commission overseeing the cathedral's construction, and the total cost came to about 96,740 rubles. The design was created by architect Alfred Parland, the creator of the church itself, though some reference works have mistakenly credited the artist Ernst Kverfeldt with the design. The forging of the wrought-iron elements was entrusted to Karl Winkler's art-and-construction locksmith works, with the work overseen by the owner's sons, Wilhelm and Eduard.

The railing consists of five sections with a total length of 257.5 meters; each section is about 3.74 meters wide and four meters high. It rests on a granite base, while the round stone posts are faced with shaped molded brick and finished with details in Estonian marble — bands, bases, and capitals. The forged pattern of interlacing stems, leaves, flowers, and fruit echoes the garlands decorating the cathedral's interior. Electric lamps were installed in the gates on the church's central axis, and the railing itself is made not of cast iron, as is often mistakenly claimed, but of wrought iron.

In the 1920s, when tram tracks for what is now Tsaritsynsky Proyezd were laid through the garden, some sections of the railing had to be moved and reoriented along the tracks. During the Soviet period, some decorative details disappeared from the railing. Presumably in the 1990s, two sections of the railing southeast of the cathedral vanished without a trace; a temporary railing of a simplified pattern was installed in their place, and the restoration of the lost fragments, planned for 2024, had still not begun by 2025.

Today the Mikhailovsky Garden railing remains one of the most photographed examples of wrought-iron decoration in the city and is protected as part of the architectural ensemble of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. Despite the loss of individual sections and traces of twentieth-century alterations, most of the original early-twentieth-century pattern has survived almost unchanged.

For more than a century this railing has demonstrated how Art Nouveau architecture used metal to create almost lace-like decorative forms. The combination of forged ornament, colored stone, and gilded details makes the Mikhailovsky Garden railing a rare example, for Saint Petersburg, of a style not typically found among the city's austere classical fences.