Saint Isaac's Cathedral. St. Isaac's Cathedral: interesting facts Features and interesting facts of St. Isaac's Cathedral

14.01.2018

St. Isaac's Cathedral is the main Orthodox church in St. Petersburg. As well as an architectural monument, a museum and a concert hall, in a word, a building of outstanding cultural significance. It rises above the surrounding buildings and is visible from afar, symbolically marking the central part of the city. What Interesting Facts associated with St. Isaac's Cathedral?

1. Initially, on the site of the cathedral stood a modest wooden church, built in 1707 and consecrated in honor of Isaac of Dalmatia, since the founder of the city, Peter I, was born just on the day of the memory of this saint.
2. Already rebuilt in stone and moved to a new location - away from the river, the cathedral was seriously damaged by fire twice and was rebuilt several times. An attempt to make it large failed until the 19th century.
3. The project of a five-domed cathedral with a bell tower, created by the great Antonio Rinaldi under Catherine II, did not have time to be implemented, and in 1798 it was entrusted to finish it to the Italian Vincenzo Brenne, the court architect of Paul I.
4. Due to lack of funding, the building turned out to be truncated, disproportionate and trimmed partly with marble, partly with brick.
5. Alexander I ordered to add grandeur and proper luxury to the temple, announcing a competition for projects in 1809, but subsequently rejecting all options for several years.
6. As a result, in 1814, luck smiled on the little-known Frenchman Auguste Montferrand, who had recently fought in Napoleon's army. He prudently provided the emperor with a whole album with options for the cathedral in various styles, as well as other structures, including the equestrian statue of Alexander I. He was entrusted with the construction.
7. The first draft of the cathedral, proposed by Montferrand and approved in 1818, was criticized by architects, engineers, sculptors, so that in the end it was redone and already in 1825 re-coordinated in a corrected form.
8. It took 5 years to build the foundation for the cathedral. To strengthen the soil, log pine piles were driven in around the perimeter of the foundation. When it was necessary to cut their tops at the same level, they used water: it was winter, the flooded trench quickly froze and the piles were leveled on the ice surface.
9. The columns of the cathedral are made of solid granite, brought from a quarry near Vyborg. At first, the workpieces were roughly processed so that they could be rolled over logs, then they were loaded onto barges on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, and from the port of St. Petersburg to the construction site they were transported along a specially built railway.
10. During the construction, it was the columns weighing more than 100 tons each that were installed first, and then the construction of the walls began.
11. Under the first column, Alexander I personally laid a platinum medal.
12. The dome of the cathedral consists of three "layers": the inner hemisphere, the middle cone and the outer cone resting on its ribs - made of gilded copper.
13. To reduce the weight of the dome, the space between the ribs of the frame was filled with clay pots held together with mortar. They needed 100,000 pieces.
14. It took 360 kg of gold to decorate the cathedral from the inside, the walls are decorated with multi-colored marble, the columns are carved from blue lapis lazuli and green malachite.
15. Above the main (royal) doors of the iconostasis is a stained-glass window, first used in the decoration of an Orthodox church.
16. AT Soviet era the cathedral was an anti-religious museum, where the superiority of science over religion was demonstrated in every possible way.

In the 21st century, St. Isaac's Cathedral turned out to be not only the main tourist attraction of St. Petersburg, but also the subject of political and public disputes. It is planned to transfer the cathedral to the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, but at the end of 2017 it is still a secular institution, although divine services are also held there daily.

1 temple: back in 1707 in the city under construction at the behest of Peter I The church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia was erected. * The emperor decided not without reason to honor him - he was born on the day of the holy memory of the reverend, May 30 according to the Julian calendar.

Here, in a hastily built church soaked in ship's pitch, married in 1712 Peter I and Marta Skavronskaya (Catherine I).

2 temple: the second, already stone, church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia was laid in 1717 y - the first one was already dilapidated by that time. The temple stood on the banks of the Neva, approximately at the place where it now rises Bronze Horseman . The building is very resembled the Peter and Paul Cathedral with its architectural design and high spire. However, the coastal soil under the church constantly sagged, and in 1735 it was badly damaged by a lightning strike. Then the architect Savva Chevakinsky was invited to assess the state of the cathedral. He did not dissemble and said that the building would not last long. It was necessary to change the location of the cathedral and build it anew. From that moment began the history of St. Isaac's Cathedral, which we know.

3 temple: Savva Chevakinsky was appointed in 1761 to head the construction of the new St. Isaac's Cathedral, but the preparations were delayed, and soon the architect resigned. His place was taken by Antonio Rinaldi, and the ceremonial laying of the cathedral took place only in 1768. Rinaldi supervised the construction until the death of Catherine II, and after that he went abroad. The building was erected only up to the eaves. At the direction of Paul I, Vincenzo Brenna took over the cathedral and changed the project.

Marble for cladding was redirected to the Mikhailovsky Castle, so the cathedral looked strange - brick walls rose on a marble base. This "monument of two reigns" was consecrated in 1802, but it soon became clear that it spoils the appearance of "ceremonial Petersburg". Under Alexander I, a competition for its ennoblement was held twice: in 1809 and 1813. All the architects offered to simply demolish it and build a new one, so the emperor instructed the engineer Augustine Betancourt to take over the reconstruction project of the cathedral personally.

He entrusted this matter to a young architect Auguste Montferrand. Masters were then available in St. Petersburg and more experienced, but the Frenchman turned out to be a clever diplomat. He made and handed over to the king at once 24 projects in a variety of styles, even in Chinese. The emperor liked this zeal, and Montferrand was appointed court architect.

4 temple: The new cathedral was laid in 1819, but the project had to be finalized by Auguste Montferrand for another six years. The construction dragged on for almost forty years, which gave rise to rumors about a certain prediction that the architect received from a clairvoyant. Allegedly, the sorcerer prophesied to him that he would die as soon as the cathedral was completed. Indeed, a month after the consecration ceremony of the cathedral, the architect died.

Another one legend says that Alexander II noticed among the sculptures of saints, with a bow greeting Isaac of Dolmatsky, Montferrand himself holding his head straight. Noticing to himself the pride of the architect, the emperor allegedly did not shake hands with him and did not thank him for the work, which made him upset, took to his bed and died.

Auguste Montferrand on the pediment of the cathedral

In fact, Montferrand died from an acute attack of rheumatism, which happened after suffering pneumonia. He bequeathed to bury himself in St. Isaac's Cathedral, but Emperor Alexander II did not give his consent. The widow of Montferrand took the body of the architect to Paris where he was buried in the Montmartre cemetery.

Engineering marvel

During the construction of the cathedral, many technologies were used, original and daring for their time. The building was unusually heavy for marshy ground, and it took drive 10,762 piles into the base of the foundation. It took five years, and at the end the townspeople began to joke on this score - they say, they somehow hammered a pile, and it completely went underground. They scored the second - and not a trace of it. Third, fourth, and so on, until a letter arrived from New York: “You ruined our pavement! At the end of a log sticking out of the ground, the stamp of the St. Petersburg timber exchange "Gromov and K!"

Worth special attention granite columns of the cathedral. Granite for them mined on the coast of the Gulf of Finland, near Vyborg. Stonemasons invented a special way to extract monolithic blocks: they drilled holes in the rock, inserted wedges into them and beat until a crack appeared in the stone. Iron levers with rings were inserted into the crack, ropes were threaded through the rings. 40 people pulled the ropes and gradually broke out the granite blocks. Stones were delivered to the city by rail, although there was no railway in Russia at that time.

The installation of 48 columns took two years and was completed in 1830, and in 1841, for the first time in history, 24 columns weighing 64 tons each were raised to a height of more than 40 meters to be installed around the dome. It took more than 100 kilograms of pure gold to gild the dome, another 300 kilograms were required to gild the interior. St. Isaac's Cathedral - the fourth largest in the world, its weight is 300 thousand tons, and its height is 101.5 meters. Isaac's Colonnade remains the highest observation platform in the city center.

Pledge of the power of the Romanovs

The incredibly protracted construction of the cathedral could not but give rise to a lot of speculation and rumors, it seemed to everyone that there was something mysterious in this long-term construction, like in a veil that Penelope wove for Odysseus and secretly unraveled.

The cathedral, founded in 1819, was completed only in 1858, but even after the consecration, the temple was constantly in need of repair and improvement, the scaffolding remained unassembled for many years.

Eventually a legend was born that while the forests stand, the Romanov dynasty also rules. It also agreed that the royal treasury allocated funds for all the finishing touches. The scaffolding from St. Isaac's Cathedral was finally removed for the first time in 1916, shortly before resignation from the Russian throne of Emperor Nicholas II in March 1917.

Another myth says that the angels on the facades of St. Isaac's Cathedral have the faces of members of the imperial family.

Cathedral goes away

The incredible heaviness of the cathedral struck the imagination of contemporaries no less than it strikes us today. St. Isaac's Cathedral is the heaviest building in St. Petersburg. Many times he was predicted to collapse, but in spite of everything, he still holds on.

One of the urban legends says that the well-known joker, one of the creators of the image of Kozma Prutkov, Alexander Zhemchuzhnikov, one night changed into the uniform of an aide-de-camp and traveled around all the leading architects of the capital with the order "to come to the palace in the morning because St. Isaac's Cathedral failed." It is easy to imagine the panic this announcement caused.

However, the legend that St. Isaac's Cathedral gradually and imperceptibly sinks under the weight own weight, is still alive.

Foucault pendulum

The Bolsheviks tried to use Isaac for anti-religious propaganda. For this in 1931, a Foucault pendulum was hung in it illustrating the rotation of the earth. The Komsomol members gathered in the temple were delighted: many argued whether a matchbox placed on a special stand would be knocked down or not. Celestial mechanics did not fail: the swing plane of the pendulum visually turned, and the box fell properly. For some reason, Soviet newspapers called it "the triumph of science over religion." Although, as you know, Foucault's first experiment was carried out with the blessing of the Pope in order to prove the power of God.

Bust of the architect Auguste Montferrand, made of 43 types of minerals and stones - all that were used in the construction of the temple

St. Isaac's Cathedral - museum

In 1963, the post-war restoration of the cathedral was completed. The Museum of Atheism was moved to the Kazan Cathedral, and the Foucault pendulum was removed, so that since then Isaac has been working as a museum. The pendulum, which amused tourists, now lies in storage in the basements of the temple. In the center of the dome, where the cable used to be fastened, the figure of a dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, has been returned. Here you can still see the bust of Auguste Montferrand, made of 43 types of minerals and stones - all that was used in the construction of the temple.

In 1990 (for the first time since 1922), His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the church. In 2005, the "Agreement between the State Museum-Monument" St. Isaac's Cathedral "and the St. Petersburg Diocese on joint activities on the territory of the objects of the museum complex" was signed, and today services are held regularly on holidays and Sundays.

At the moment, there is a trial regarding the transfer of the cathedral to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The cathedral can accommodate 15 thousand people - not in any other church in Russia.

St. Isaac's Cathedral, one of the most impressive buildings in St. Petersburg, was consecrated exactly 156 years ago, (May 30) June 11, 1858. Its history, which dates back almost from the day the Northern capital was founded, is full of unexpected twists and surprising facts..

Two predecessors

Back in 1707, in the city under construction, at the behest of Peter I, the church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia was erected. It was not for nothing that the emperor decided to honor him - he was born on the day of the holy memory of the saint, May 30 according to the Julian calendar. Here, in a hastily built church, damp and soaked with ship tar, Peter I and Marta Skavronskaya (Catherine I) were married in 1712.

First St. Isaac's Church. Lithograph from a drawing by O. Montferrand. 1845 Photo: Public Domain

The second, already stone, church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia was laid in 1717 - the first one had already dilapidated by that time. The temple stood on the banks of the Neva, approximately at the place where the Bronze Horseman now stands. The building was very reminiscent of the Peter and Paul Cathedral with its architectural design and high spire. However, the coastal soil under the church constantly sagged, and in 1735 it was badly damaged by a lightning strike. Then the architect Savva Chevakinsky was invited to assess the state of the cathedral. He did not dissemble and said that the building would not last long. It was necessary to change the location of the cathedral and build it anew. From that moment began the history of St. Isaac's Cathedral, which we know.

A fulfilled prediction

Chevakinsky and was appointed in 1761 to head the construction of the new St. Isaac's Cathedral, but the preparation was delayed, and soon the architect resigned. His place was taken by Antonio Rinaldi, and the ceremonial laying of the cathedral took place only in 1768. Rinaldi supervised the construction until the death of Catherine II, and after that he went abroad. The building was erected only up to the eaves. At the direction of Paul I, Vincenzo Brenna took over the cathedral and changed the project.

The cathedral changed architects several times, and appearance. Photo: AiF / Ksenia Matveeva

Marble for cladding was redirected to the Mikhailovsky Castle, so the cathedral looked strange - brick walls rose on a marble base. This "monument of two reigns" was consecrated in 1802, but it soon became clear that it spoils the appearance of "ceremonial Petersburg".

Under Alexander I, a competition for its ennoblement was held twice: in 1809 and 1813. All the architects offered to simply demolish it and build a new one, so the emperor instructed the engineer Augustine Betancourt to take over the reconstruction project of the cathedral personally. He entrusted this matter to the young architect Auguste Montferrand.

The new cathedral was laid in 1819, but the Montferrand project had to be finalized for another six years. The construction dragged on for almost forty years, which gave rise to rumors about a certain prediction that the architect received from a clairvoyant. Allegedly, the sorcerer prophesied to him that he would die as soon as the cathedral was completed. Indeed, a month after the consecration ceremony of the cathedral, the architect died.

Another legend says that Alexander II noticed among the sculptures of saints, with a bow greeting Isaac of Dolmatsky, Montferrand himself holding his head straight. Noticing to himself the pride of the architect, the emperor allegedly did not shake hands with him and did not thank him for the work, which made him upset, took to his bed and died. In fact, Montferrand died from an acute attack of rheumatism, which happened after suffering pneumonia. He bequeathed to bury himself in St. Isaac's Cathedral, but Emperor Alexander II did not give his consent. The widow of Montferrand took the body of the architect to Paris, where he was buried in the Montmartre cemetery.

Engineering marvel

During the construction of the cathedral, many technologies were used, original and daring for their time. The building was unusually heavy for marshy soil, and its construction required 10,762 piles to be driven into the base of the foundation. It took five years, and in the end, the townspeople began to joke about this - they say, they somehow hammered a pile, and it completely went underground. Scored the second - and from her not a trace. Third, fourth, and so on, until a letter arrived from New York: “You ruined our pavement! At the end of a log sticking out of the ground, the stamp of the St. Petersburg timber exchange "Gromov and K!"

When installing granite columns, innovative technologies for that time were used. Photo: AIF / Ksenia Matveeva Separate attention is given to the granite columns of the cathedral. Granite for them was mined on the coast of the Gulf of Finland, near Vyborg. Stonemasons invented a special way to extract monolithic blocks: they drilled holes in the rock, inserted wedges into them and beat until a crack appeared in the stone. Iron levers with rings were inserted into the crack, ropes were threaded through the rings. 40 people pulled the ropes and gradually broke out the granite blocks.

Stones were delivered to the city by rail, although there was no railway in Russia at that time. The installation of 48 columns took two years and was completed in 1830, and in 1841, for the first time in history, 24 columns weighing 64 tons each were raised to a height of more than 40 meters to be installed around the dome. It took more than 100 kilograms of pure gold to gild the dome, and another 300 kilograms were required to gild the interior.

St. Isaac's Cathedral is the fourth largest in the world, its weight is 300 thousand tons, and its height is 101.5 meters. Isaac's Colonnade remains the highest observation platform in the city center.

Museum of Atheism

Like all religious buildings, after October revolution the temple was destroyed. In May 1922, 48 kilograms of gold objects and two tons of silver were taken from Isaac to the needs of the starving Volga region. In 1928, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided "to leave the cathedral building in the exclusive use of Glavnauka as a museum monument." On April 12, 1931, one of the first Soviet Russia anti-religious museums.

This saved the temple from destruction - they began to lead excursions here, on which visitors were told about the suffering of the serf builders of the building and about the dangers of religion. Another part of the tour was of a scientific and educational nature - a Foucault pendulum hung under the dome, the length of which was 91 meters. The pendulum is still stored in the storerooms of the temple, which received the status of a state memorial museum.

War

The harsh years of the war also left the temple unscathed. The dome was covered with camouflage by military climbers (one of them, Mikhail Bobrov, lives in St. Petersburg to this day and bears the title of honorary citizen of the city). According to the legend, with the threat of the occupation of the city, it was necessary to find a repository for those valuables that they did not have time to take out. Then one elderly officer offered to collect everything in the cellars of Isaac, explaining this by the fact that the Nazis use his dome as a landmark and would not shoot at him.

All 900 days of the blockade, museum valuables from the suburbs of Leningrad, as well as the Museum of the History of the City and the Summer Palace of Peter the Great, lay in complete safety, and on the square in front of the cathedral, the blockade fighters planted a garden where they managed to grow cabbage - this is evidenced by archival footage from 1942.

But it was not possible to completely avoid damage to the cathedral - the traces of fragments on the columns of the western portico still remind of shell explosions. Due to the lack of heating, wall paintings were damaged, and Bruni's painting "Adam and Eve in Paradise" was completely washed away.

Museum present

In 1963, the post-war restoration of the cathedral was completed. The Museum of Atheism was moved to the Kazan Cathedral, and the Foucault pendulum was removed, so that since then Isaac has been working exclusively as a museum. Here and today you can see the bust of Auguste Montferrand, made of 43 types of minerals and stones - all that was used in the construction of the temple.

In 1990, for the first time since 1922, His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the church. In 2005, the "Agreement between the State Museum-Monument" St. Isaac's Cathedral "and the St. Petersburg Diocese on joint activities on the territory of the objects of the museum complex" was signed, and today services are held regularly on holidays and Sundays.

1. Official name- Cathedral of St. Isaac of Dalmatia. It was consecrated in the name of the Monk Isaac of Dalmatia, revered as a saint by Peter I, since the emperor was born on the day of his memory - May 30 according to the Julian calendar.

2. St. Isaac's Cathedral - one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world. Above only the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.

3. The cathedral was built according to the design of the architect Auguste Montferrand. St. Isaac's Cathedral is the main creation of the author.

4. The foundation of St. Isaac's Cathedral is an engineering marvel. It is made up of 10,762 pine piles and supports the enormous mass of the cathedral, in excess of 300,000 tons. And all this stands on the swampy soil of St. Petersburg.

5. The existing cathedral is the fourth church on this site with the same name. The first was the Church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia, it was wooden (built in 1707). And in 1717, to replace it, they began to build a stone church on the site where the Bronze Horseman now stands. The third building was built in 1768-1802.

6. Montferrand built the cathedral for 40 years. According to legend, the architect was predicted that he would die immediately after the construction was completed. Montferrand died a month after the consecration.

7. For the creation of statues and bas-reliefs, the most advanced electroforming technology was used, which made it possible for the first time in the world to place multi-meter copper statues at a height.

8. The gilding of the dome of the cathedral claimed dozens of lives: they gilded with an amalgam of mercury, and it is poisonous.

9. From 1931 to 1986, Foucault's pendulum was located and worked in St. Isaac's Cathedral. Now it is stored in the basement storage of the museum.

10. During the Great Patriotic War in the cellars of St. Isaac's Cathedral, exhibits from many museums in Leningrad and its suburbs were kept.

11. In terms of the number of visitors, among the museums of St. Petersburg, St. Isaac's Cathedral is in third place, only Peterhof and the Hermitage are ahead. In 2014 St. Isaac's Cathedral was visited by 3.2 million people.

12. Museum complex "State Museum-monument" St. Isaac's Cathedral "
- the only state museum in Russia that exists not on budgetary funds, but on its own income. In addition, the museum pays taxes - about 50-70 million rubles a year.

13. Divine services have been regularly held in St. Isaac's Cathedral since 2005 - on holidays and Sundays.

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St. Isaac's Cathedral was erected for 40 years, and when the scaffolding was finally removed from it, the need for construction as in a temple disappeared almost immediately.

About who built the famous temple, how many reconstructions he went through and what legends surround him - in the material of the Kultura.RF portal.

THREE PRECURSORS OF ISAAC'S COUNCIL

Saint Isaac's Cathedral Auguste Montferrand was the fourth cathedral built on this square. The first church in honor of St. Isaac of Dalmatia was erected for the workers of the Admiralty shipyards almost immediately after the foundation Petersburg . Rather, it was rebuilt from the building of the drawing barn under the direction of Harman van Boles. Peter I born on the day of memory of St. Isaac, in 1712 he married Catherine I here. Already in 1717, when the old church began to deteriorate, a new stone building was laid. The construction was led by Georg Mattarnovi and Nikolai Gerbel. Half a century later, when the second Peter's church fell into disrepair, the third building was laid - already in a different place, a little further from the banks of the Neva. Its architect was Antonio Rinaldi.

DRAWER'S VICTORY OVER ARCHITECTS

The competition for the construction of the current St. Isaac's Cathedral was announced in 1809 by Alexander I. Among its participants were the best architects of their time - Andrian Zakharov, Andrei Voronikhin, Vasily Stasov, Giacomo Quarenghi, Charles Cameron. However, none of their projects satisfied the emperor. In 1816, on the advice of the head of the Committee for Buildings and Hydraulic Works, Augustine Betancourt, the work on the cathedral was entrusted to the young architect Auguste Montferrand. This decision was surprising: Montferrand did not have much experience in construction - he proved himself not with buildings, but with drawings.

UNSUCCESSFUL START OF CONSTRUCTION

The inexperience of the architect played a role. In 1819, the construction of the cathedral began according to the design of Montferrand, but just a year later, Anton Maudui, a member of the Committee for Buildings and Hydraulic Works, thoroughly criticized his project. He believed that when planning the foundations and pylons (support pillars), Montferrand made gross mistakes. This was due to the fact that the architect wanted to make the most of the fragments that remained from the Rinaldi Cathedral. Although at first Montferrand fought off Maudui's criticism with all his might, he later agreed with the criticism - and construction was suspended.

ARCHITECTURAL AND ENGINEERING ACHIEVEMENTS

In 1825, Montferrand designed a grand new building in the style classicism . Its height was 101.5 meters, and the diameter of the dome was almost 26 meters. The construction was extremely slow: it took 5 years only to create the foundation. For the foundation, deep trenches had to be dug, where tarred piles were driven in - more than 12 thousand pieces. After that, all the trenches were connected to each other and filled with water. With the onset of cold weather, the water froze, and the piles were cut down to the level of the ice. It took another two years to install the columns of four covered galleries - porticoes , granite monoliths for which were supplied from Vyborg quarries.

For the next six years, walls and domed pillars were erected, another four years - vaults, domes and bell towers.

The main dome was not made of stone, as was traditionally done, but of metal, which greatly lightened its weight. When designing this structure, Montferrand was guided by the dome of London's St. Paul's Cathedral by Christopher Wren.

It took more than 100 kilograms of gold to gild the dome.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF SCULPTORS TO THE DESIGN OF THE CATHEDRAL

The sculptural decoration of the cathedral was created under the direction of Ivan Vitali.

By analogy with the Golden Gates of the Florentine Baptistery, he made impressive bronze doors with images of saints.

Vitali also became the author of statues of 12 apostles and angels on the corners of the building and above pilasters (flat columns). Bronze reliefs depicting biblical scenes performed by Vitali himself and Philippe Honore Lemaire were placed above the pediments. Also, Peter Klodt and Alexander Loganovsky participated in the sculptural decoration of the temple.

STAINED GLASS, STONE FINISHING AND OTHER INTERIOR DETAILS

Work on the interiors of the cathedral took 17 years and ended only in 1858. Inside the temple was decorated with valuable types of stones - lapis lazuli, malachite, porphyry, different types marble.

The main artists of their time worked on the painting of the cathedral: Fyodor Bruni painted The Last Judgment, Karl Bryullov - more than 800-meter "Virgin in Glory" in the ceiling.

Iconostasis The cathedral was built in the form of a triumphal arch and decorated with monolithic malachite columns. The icons, made in the mosaic technique, were created according to the picturesque originals by Timothy Neff.

Mosaics decorated not only the iconostasis, but also a significant part of the walls of the temple. In the window of the main altar there was a stained-glass window depicting the Resurrection of Christ, made by Heinrich Maria von Hess.

EXPENSIVE PLEASURE

At the time of construction, St. Isaac's Cathedral became the most expensive church in Europe.

Only 2.5 million rubles were spent on laying the foundation. In total, Isaac cost the treasury 23 million rubles.

For comparison: the entire construction of St. Isaac's Trinity Cathedral cost two million. This was due both to the grandiose size (the temple, 102 meters high, still remains one of the largest cathedrals in the world), and to the luxurious interior and exterior decoration of the building.

Nicholas I , taken aback by such expenses, ordered to save at least on utensils.

DESIGNATION OF THE TEMPLE

The consecration of the cathedral was held as a public holiday: it was attended by Alexander II and the event lasted about seven hours.

Spectator seats were located around the cathedral, tickets for which cost a lot of money: from 25 to 100 rubles. Enterprising townspeople even rented out apartments with a view of St. Isaac's Cathedral, from where one could watch the ceremony.

Despite the fact that there were many people who wanted to attend the event, many of them did not appreciate St. Isaac's Cathedral, and at first, because of its proportions, the temple was nicknamed "The Inkwell".

MYTHS AND LEGENDS

It was rumored that such a long construction of the cathedral was by no means caused by the complexity of the work, but by the fact that the clairvoyant predicted Montferrand's death immediately after the completion of the temple. Indeed, the architect died a month after the consecration of Isaac. The will of the architect - to bury him in the temple - was never fulfilled. The coffin with the body of the architect was surrounded around the temple, and then handed over to the widow, who took the remains of her husband to Paris. After the death of Montferrand, passers-by allegedly saw his ghost wandering along the steps of the cathedral - he did not dare to enter the temple.

According to another legend, the house Romanovs was supposed to fall after the removal of the scaffolding that surrounded the cathedral for a long time after the consecration. Coincidence or not, but the scaffolding was finally removed in 1916, and in March 1917 Nicholas II abdicated the throne.

TEMPLE IN THE SOVIET TIME

In the first years of Soviet power, the temple remained active, but the state did not finance it, and seized all church valuables.

In 1931, an anti-religious museum was opened in the museum building. One of the key exhibits was the 90-meter Foucault pendulum suspended from the dome of the cathedral, which proved the fact of the Earth's rotation around its axis.

During the Great Patriotic War in the cellars of Isaac there was a warehouse where museum valuables were stored, which did not have time evacuate .

Since the German pilots used the dome of the cathedral as a guide, they did not shoot directly at the cathedral - and the vault remained unscathed.

However, the cathedral still suffered during the war years: the fragments that exploded near the temple damaged the columns, and the cold (Isaac was not heated during the siege) damaged the wall paintings.