Sampsonievsky Cathedral

Sampsonievsky Cathedral stands in the Vyborg Side district of Saint Petersburg and is among the earliest surviving churches in the city.

The site's history dates back to 1710, when a wooden church dedicated to Sampson the Hospitable was built here — a saint whose feast day fell on the day the Russian army won its victory at Poltava the year before. Construction of the stone cathedral on this site stretched from 1728 to 1740: work was repeatedly halted for lack of funds and only resumed in earnest during the reign of Anna Ioannovna. The name of the architect has not been established with certainty — researchers believe the construction was overseen either by a member of the Trezzini family or by the architect Mikhail Zemtsov.

By decree of Peter I, a cemetery was opened next to the church in 1711 and had grown to nearly five hectares by the mid-18th century. A separate section was set aside for foreigners in Russian service: buried there were the architect Domenico Trezzini, the sculptor Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli the Elder, the President of the Academy of Sciences Lavrenty Blumentrost, the court painters Louis Caravaque and Torelli, and Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich. The necropolis was closed by order of Catherine II in 1770; the burials themselves have not survived, and a public garden was laid out on the site, into which the surviving fragments of gravestones were moved. Also buried within the church grounds were Artemy Volynsky, Andrei Khrushchov, and the architect Pyotr Yeropkin, all executed in 1740 — their shared grave was marked with a monument only in 1885.

In 1820 the merchant Israel Blank was baptized within these walls — the future maternal grandfather of Vladimir Lenin; the newly baptized man received the name Alexander and the patronymic Dmitrievich.

The ensemble is made up of three structures — the church itself, the bell tower, and a chapel — all painted a uniform pale blue. The cathedral's onion domes are set close together on a shared drum, giving the silhouette an unusual, almost fairy-tale appearance. The three-tiered bell tower, with an arched passage running through its lower tier, carries a belfry with an 18th-century bell and is topped with a tented roof with false windows. The chapel was added in 1800 in the Elizabethan Baroque style, following the manner of Rastrelli — its wall bears a cast-iron plaque with the words of encouragement Peter I spoke before the Battle of Poltava.

In the Soviet years, from 1938, services in the cathedral ceased: the building housed a ready-made clothing shop, and the bells were removed. Restoration began in 1984, when the cathedral was brought into the structure of the St. Isaac's Cathedral museum complex. Regular services resumed in 2010, and in 2017 the church was handed over to the diocese for a term of 49 years.