To visit St. Petersburg and not see St. Isaac’s Cathedral means not to visit this city. The cathedral is one of its brightest symbols, and in order to see it with my own eyes, hundreds of thousands of people come to the northern capital annually. Not to mention the fact that pilgrims from all over Russia, as well as from other countries, are striving for him.
In the past, inside it was a real Foucault pendulum, one of the few in the world. He clearly showed the rotation of our planet. However, later the pendulum was dismantled. The area of the original mosaic in the inner part of St. Isaac’s Cathedral reached 6.5 thousand square meters. meters. The decoration of the interior of the cathedral took about 400 kilograms of gold. About a century ago, an anti-religious museum was opened inside St. Isaac’s Cathedral, opened by the Soviet authorities. Another cathedral of St. Petersburg, Kazan, also did not avoid such a fate in its time – the museum of the history of religions and atheism worked in it. The height of St. Isaac’s Cathedral is as much as 101.5 meters.
Its mass, together with the foundation, exceeds 300 thousand tons. The granite columns in the outside of the cathedral look very impressive. It is not surprising – each of them weighs about 64 tons! St. Isaac’s Cathedral is the first largest in St. Petersburg and the fourth in the whole world. The famous French architect Auguste Montferrand was involved in its construction. He bequeathed to bury him in the cathedral built by him, but Emperor Alexander II did not give this go-ahead, therefore, after the death of Montferrand, his body was sent to his native France. St. Isaac’s Cathedral stands on unstable swampy soil. This fact was taken into account from the very beginning, so the foundation of the building rests on solid piles, of which there are already 10,762 pieces.
The construction of St. Isaac’s Cathedral dragged on for almost forty years. Officially, it is now (since 1928) considered a museum, but it still holds regular worship services. St. Isaac’s Cathedral was built by order of Emperor Nicholas I. Moreover, the monarch personally controlled the construction until his death. During the Great Patriotic War, the building was slightly damaged by shell fragments. Chips did not begin to be restored, and even now they remind of the hardships of life in besieged Leningrad.
