Trinity Izmailovsky Cathedral

The Trinity Izmailovsky Cathedral, also known as the Holy Trinity Izmailovsky Cathedral, stands at the corner of Troitsky and Izmailovsky Prospects and served as the regimental church of the Life Guards Izmailovsky Regiment. The regiment's first field church was consecrated in 1733, soon after its arrival in Saint Petersburg, and in 1754–1756 a wooden five-domed church was built on the site, modeled on the church at the estate of Empress Elizabeth's confessor. The flood of 1824 seriously damaged the wooden building, and it was decided to erect a stone cathedral on the site to a design by the architect Vasily Stasov, preserving the earlier appearance as a model.

The foundation stone of the new church was laid in 1828 in the presence of Empress Maria Feodorovna and Tsesarevich Alexander Nikolaevich; construction was funded both by Emperor Nicholas I's personal funds and by the treasury, at a total cost of about three million rubles. During construction, a storm once tore off the dome, forcing some of the icons to be repainted. The cathedral was consecrated in 1835. The building is executed in the Late Classicist style: the massive cubic volume of the church is adorned on all four sides with severe six-column porticoes, while the central dome and the four surrounding smaller domes are covered in blue enamel with gold stars—a detail that makes the cathedral one of the most recognizable silhouettes on the city's skyline.

The cathedral witnessed a number of significant events: in 1867 the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky married Anna Snitkina here, and in 1894 the funeral service for the composer Anton Rubinstein was held here. From 1928 to 1938, the church held the status of cathedral of the Metropolitans of Leningrad. It was closed for worship in 1938, and there was even a proposal to convert the building into a crematorium; during the Soviet period it housed a warehouse, and its façades were damaged during the Great Patriotic War, though its exterior appearance was partially restored during renovations in the 1950s–1960s.

The cathedral was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1990, and restoration work resumed in 2004. In August 2006, a fire that broke out on scaffolding during restoration destroyed the wooden structure of the great dome, which had stood for more than 170 years; the dome was subsequently rebuilt in the following years. Today, the Trinity Izmailovsky Cathedral is one of the largest Orthodox churches in Saint Petersburg and a federally protected architectural monument of Russian Classicism.