St. Isaac's Cathedral

We went to St. Isaac’s Cathedral today. You know—big thing, golden dome, baroque design, right across from the Philological Faculty?

That’s ok; I’ve got some pictures. I’ll see if I can’t post them soon.

The history of St. Isaac’s might sound familiar. See, it goes something like this: the tsar wanted to build a cathedral in a swamp, but the first one sank, so he built a second one, and that one sank too, so he built a third one. That one burned down and then sank, but—

Well, it’s not quite that bad. The first one was wooden, so it rotted and had to be reinforced and ultimately just wasn’t big enough (really—it was quite modest). The second one actually did sink into the swamp, at least enough to collapse the roof, and the third one, as far as I can tell, just turned out to be really ugly and had to be dismantled. Also, it wasn’t one tsar—it was three or four tsars and a tsarina, over the course of about a hundred and fifty years. The final cathedral alone took forty years to build.

The cathedral is very impressive, in a different way from the Hermitage—a way that has less to do with being mind-bogglingly expansive than with having lots and lots of 100-ton granite pillars. The inside is also pretty good, but we didn’t start there. We started with the colonnade.

The colonnade is on the roof of the church, around the dome (which is the fourth-largest church dome anywhere, if you like useless facts). The staircase up has somewhat more than 200 steps—which I know because it was marked, presumably to give tourists some kind of hope. Once you’re up there’s a pretty good view of the city (which I’ll post pictures of), though there was a large crane about two blocks away obstructing a lot of stuff to the east.

The inside is, well, also impressive. The Russian Orthodox Church doesn’t believe in things like pews (I don’t know what to say to that except—typical), so there’s nothing to distract you from the amount of space there is in there. Oh, except maybe the fact that every inch of it is decorated. There are mosaics on the walls, statues and frescoes in the dome, carvings on the doors (bronzed oak), columns surfaced with things like lapis lazuli, and even a stained glass window behind the altar (rare in Russian churches—probably because you can’t put a stained glass window behind another window very effectively). It’s, ah, not bad. And it survived WWII mostly intact, too.

How this came to be, incidentally, is interesting: most of the palaces and cathedrals in St. Petersburg survived the Siege of Leningrad because bomber pilots needed them as landmarks. Unlike Peterhof, say, which is several miles outside of the city and more or less had to be completely rebuilt.

More confusing to me was how the church had survived the Soviet era, since (in addition to all the religious symbols everywhere) there are inscriptions above the doors that read along the lines of, “God save the tsar.” Well, it turns out that while Stalin was in power they turned the cathedral into—I’m not kidding—the Museum of Anti-Religious Enlightenment. Took away all the icons, covered the mosaics with ugly posters, took down the silver dove and hung a Foucault pendulum from the dome, and held anti-religious lectures.

I think that actually makes the Soviet Union more comprehensible, though. The idea of turning the city’s main cathedral into the museum of anti-religion is so obviously over the top that no Soviet fanatic would think of it—imagine, trying to turn people against religion by covering up beauty with ugliness! An idea like that could only have come from a moderate looking for an excuse to save the church that couldn’t possibly be called suspicious. I mean, when you get down to it, most people are pretty normal, right—the kind of people who see the value in not destroying their nation’s cultural heritage.

Well, maybe I lied a little. Bringing people to a cathedral to show them the wrongness of religion is probably exactly the kind of idea that could have occurred to a diehard communist. Someone decided to have the cathedral restored at the end of WWII, though.

Besides—I liked the other version better.