1995
St. Petersburg
Monument to Revolutionary Fighters
On March 23, 1917, the 180 people who died in the February
Revolution were buried in a common grave in
the center of the Field of Mars, which was marked two years later by the
Monument to Revolutionary Fighters.
Epitaphs by Commissar
Lunacharsky adorn the gravestones, and an eternal flame flickers in the
center.
The Hermitage
The genesis of the Hermitage collection was Peter
the Great's purchase of two dozen maritime scenes during a visit to Holland
in 1697,
which were hung in the palace of Monplaisir at Peterhof. As his collection
grew, Peter installed works in the Winter Palace, setting a
precedent for Catherine
the Great, who constructed the Hermitage specifically to house her
burgeoning art collection. Today the
museum
houses over three million works of art from the Stone
Age to the 20th century.
The Bronze Horseman
A statue of Peter
the Great which made its literary debut in Pushkin's
epic The
Bronze Horseman (1833),
an evocation of the Great
Flood of 1824. It was sculpted by the French sculptor, Etienne
Falconet,
at the behest of Catherine
the Great to glorify "enlightened
absolutism."
Church on Spilled Blood
Begun in 1882 on the orders of Alexander
III, to commemorate his father, Alexander
II, who was
assassinated on the site the previous year. It was decreed that the altar
should be built on the very
spot where his blood had stained the cobblestones. It was designed to
resemble St. Basil's in Moscow.
Kazan Cathedral
The cathedral was built to house the venerated icon, Our
Lady of Kazan, reputed to have appeared miraculously
overnight in Kazan in 1579, and transferred to St. Petersburg by Peter
the Great, where it resided until 1904--when
it disappeared without trace. The bronze doors are an exact copy of
Lorenzo
Ghiberti's doors for the Florentine Baptistery.