Saint Isaac's Cathedral

The gilded dome of Saint Isaac's rises 101.5 metres over the square that bears its name, and on a clear day it is the reference point for half of central Saint Petersburg. The building is the fourth church on the site, commissioned by Alexander I and entrusted to Auguste de Montferrand, a French-born architect trained in the studio of Charles Percier. Construction ran from 1818 to 1858; Montferrand died within about a month of the consecration, having given four decades of his career to a single commission. The result is late Neoclassicism on an imperial scale: a Greek-cross plan, four identical octastyle porticoes, a central dome on a tall colonnaded drum and four smaller cupolas.

The engineering is as much the story as the architecture. The marshy ground had to be stabilised with a forest of timber piles before anything could stand on it. The 112 red granite columns, quarried at Pyterlahti on the Finnish side of the Gulf, were each cut from a single block; the largest portico shafts are 17 metres tall and weigh around 114 tonnes, and they were raised with wooden scaffolding and capstans before the walls went up. The dome rests on a cast-iron frame, and its twelve angels were produced by electrotyping rather than conventional bronze casting, which kept them thin and light. The price was paid in human terms too: the mercury-based gilding of the dome is recorded to have killed dozens of workers.

Inside, the scale is matched by the materials. The iconostasis is framed by malachite and lapis lazuli columns, the bronze doors carry reliefs by Ivan Vitali modelled on Ghiberti's Florentine baptistery doors, and the painted scheme by Karl Bryullov and others was partly translated into mosaic when damp began to damage the canvases. In 1931 the Soviet authorities turned the cathedral into an anti-religious museum and hung a Foucault pendulum under the dome; during the Second World War the gilding was painted grey so it would not guide enemy aircraft. Today it is a state museum with services held in a side chapel and on major feast days, after a 2017 plan to hand it to the Orthodox Church stalled amid public protest. Two spiral staircases of about 200 steps lead up to the colonnade around the drum, which gives a panorama over the historic centre.

Montferrand's hand can be traced beyond the city: in the same years he designed the Spassky cathedral of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, a smaller five-domed cousin of this building. Saint Petersburg itself was laid out as an imperial capital on the Neva delta, and Saint Isaac's is the heaviest of the monuments that set its skyline.

Getting there

The cathedral stands on St Isaac's Square (No. 4), about 0.7 km from the core of central Saint Petersburg. Pulkovo Airport (LED) is about 15 km away by road.