Saint Isaac's Square

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Saint Isaac's Square (Russian: Исаа́киевская пло́щадь; known as Vorovsky Square between 1923 and 1944) in Saint Petersburg, Russia is a major city square sprawling between the Marie Palace and Saint Isaac's Cathedral, which separates it from Decembrists Square. The square is dominated by the equestrian Monument to Nicholas I.

The Lobanov-Rostovsky House (1817-20) on the west side of the square was designed by Auguste de Montferrand. It may be described as an Empire style building that has an eight-column portico facing the Russian Admiralty. The main porch features the twin statues of lions on granite pedestals; they were made famous by Pushkin in his last long poem, The Bronze Horseman. Nearby is Quarenghi's Horse Guards' Riding Hall (1804-07), in part inspired by the Parthenon and flanked by the marble statues of the Dioscuri, by Paolo Triscorni.

Opposite the cathedral is the Marie Palace, built in 1829-1844 for Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna. Currently the palace houses the city's legislative assembly. In front of the palace is the 97-metre-wide Blue Bridge, which used to be the widest in Saint Petersburg. Spanning the Moika River, the bridge is usually perceived as the extension of the square, although in fact it forms a separate square, called Mariyinskaya. To the right from the bridge is so-called Neptune's Scale, with a granite top. This is a stele which marks water levels during major floods.

To the east from the cathedral is the six-storey Hotel Astoria, designed by Fyodor Lidval in 1911-1912 as one of the most luxurious in the Russian Empire.^[1] The poet Sergei Yesenin committed suicide in the hotel. The building found at the corner of Bolshaya Morskaya Street is associated with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who lived there in 1848-1849. At this period, he published his first work of fiction, White Nights.

Houses 13 and 14, which overlook the Moika, are occupied by the Russian Institute of Plant Breeding which bears the name of Academician Nikolai Vavilov. The institute shared a unique collection of 160,000 cultivated plants, which he collected while travelling in every continent from 1921 to 1940. After the end of the war, a journal published in London reported that Vavilov's collection was lost during the Siege of Leningrad. However, the report was false: although many starved to death, the institute's staff would not consume a single grain of rice or potato tuber from the collection.^[2]

One of the last buildings to be erected on the square was the trapezoidal red-granite German Embassy (1911-12), by Peter Behrens. The building is a reference point in the history of Western architecture, as it was the first specimen of stripped classicism, a style that enjoyed immense popularity in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.^[3]

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