St. Isaac's 4.0

June 26, 1819

Isaac of Dalmatia (also known as Saint Isaac the Confessor) lived in the fourth century in and around Constantinople, and would probably not have acquired any significance for Russians had it not been that his saint’s day on the Orthodox calendar, May 30, happened to coincide with Peter the Great’s birthday.

Peter was hardly a pious man, but he made sure that his namesake city had the finest of churches. Soon after the city was founded, in the early eighteenth century, in fact when it was nothing more than a fortress, the Saint Peter and Paul Cathedral was built within those fortress walls and dedicated to Peter’s patron saint.

A few years later, a church dedicated to Isaac of Dalmatia was established on the other side of the Neva, next to the Admiralty, the spire of which was designed by the Dutch architect Harmen van Bol’es.

Today, now that the huge dome of St. Isaac’s towers over the center of the city, not far from the granite embankment, the sumptuous Senate and Synod Building, and the iconic Bronze Horseman statue, it is hard to imagine that in its first incarnation this church was much smaller and located on the Admiralty Meadow (yes, there was once a meadow in the center of St. Petersburg), and that it first consisted of what was basically a repurposed wooden storehouse. In 1712, Peter wed his second wife, Martha Skawronska (who would go on to become Empress Catherine I), in this church. Soon after the wedding it became clear that the growing city needed a larger and grander church.

The first St. Isaac’s was torn down, and the second, a bit bigger, was placed closer to the Neva, approximately where the menacing Bronze Horseman stands frozen in mid-gallop today. The church’s appearance also changed to keep up with the style of the city. This version was Petrine Baroque – not quite as lavish as Western European baroque architecture or the palaces and churches that Peter’s successors built. Nevertheless, the church was in the Western style. It was designed to feature an elongated Latin cross, rather than a Greek one, with arms of equal length. The tall, three-tiered bell tower was adorned with a clock that Peter brought from Amsterdam, and the windows were plate glass. One can only imagine what an impression this made on the workers herded into St. Petersburg from across Russia to build the city. Up to that point, the only other church built in this style in Russia was the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, which also had a tall spire, this one topped by an angel.

This second St. Isaac’s was worked on by a succession of architects: some quit, some died, and others stepped in to take their place. From the start, construction was plagued by misfortune. First, design flaws caused cracking in the vaults, and later, when the church was essentially complete and fully decorated, lightning hit the spire and the building caught fire. Next, the city’s arch nemesis raised its ugly head: the Neva began to wash away the church’s foundation (today’s granite-reinforced embankment did not yet exist). In 1760, toward the end of the reign of Peter’s daughter Empress Elizabeth, a decision was made to tear down the church.

The third St. Isaac’s was sited farther from the river, but the church continued to be plagued by problems that only grew worse with time. The first architect, Savva Chevakinsky, was unable to come to terms with the new empress, Catherine II, about the church’s appearance and withdrew from the project. Antonio Rinaldi then took over and spent many hard years trying to build a cathedral in the very center of the city, which now included the sumptuous Winter Palace. Money was poured into construction, but it still advanced slowly, and all that money was never enough. As a result, more than thirty years later, in 1796, Catherine died without seeing a completed cathedral.

Catherine’s son Paul I, who had long thirsted for power (from which his mother had kept him at arm’s length), ascended the throne. Paul wanted to reign as differently as possible from his mother. He released from prison those his mother had arrested, and changed many of her laws. Construction of the cathedral continued, of course, but Paul put his own architect, Vincenzo Brenna, in charge.

Brenna also built Paul his idiosyncratic Mikhailovsky Castle, which reflected Paul’s fascination with medieval knighthood. The marble that was supposed to be used for St. Isaac’s walls was sent to be used in the castle – a place designed with Paul’s safety in mind but which wound up being the site of his 1801 assassination. By then, St. Isaac’s was almost finished, but its walls – marble below and brick above – were the butt of jokes. This ridicule was forcibly silenced: an officer who tried to fasten an epigram making fun of the church to its walls was arrested on orders of the tsar, had his tongue cut out, and was sent into exile.

Only in 1802, a year after Paul’s son Alexander I had taken the throne, was the cathedral finally finished. It was immediately clear that this strange creation, the child of different architects working in incompatible styles and combining incompatible materials, had to be demolished. A decision was made to replace it with a new cathedral, and several architects competed for the right to design it. The young Frenchman Auguste de Montferrand won the commission.

Montferrand was a student of the French school of architecture during the Napoleonic era, and of course had absorbed the thinking of his era, according to which an empire’s most important buildings had to be majestic and grand, in keeping with the mandates of Empire style. The architect had taken part in Napoleon’s campaigns, but after his defeat decided to cast his lot with the Russian emperor. When Russian troops entered Paris, he managed to get an audience with the tsar and show him an album of his works (the album bore a dedication to Alexander).

Montferrand’s grand style so appealed to the Russian court that he soon relocated. On June 26, 1819, the foundation was laid for a new – the fourth – Cathedral of Saint Isaac.

The architect decided to build a huge cathedral whose dome would be reminiscent of Paris’ Panthéon and Les Invalides. Again, difficulties arose. The design had to be revised because the soil could not withstand the pressure of this gigantic structure, and great efforts were required to bring the huge quantity of granite needed to the city, erect walls that in some spots were five meters thick, and install and gild the giant dome.

According to estimates, as many as 400,000 men may have been involved in building this cathedral, and a quarter of them may have died from disease or accidents. It was finally completed in 1842, having cost 23 million silver rubles – an enormous sum in those days. The next 16 years were spent decorating the cathedral with murals and mosaics, an effort slowed by St. Petersburg’s humidity, temperature fluctuations, and frigid winter weather. Some wondered whether Montferrand was working so slowly because he had been told he would die once the cathedral was completed. Indeed: the architect died in 1858, soon after his masterpiece was consecrated.

And that might have marked an end to the troubles afflicting the church dedicated to Isaac of Dalmatia and the beginning of a calm and uplifting existence for this grand cathedral. But then, just over half a century later, came the revolution. After 1917, St. Isaac’s parishioners did manage to preserve its congregation and attend services there for eleven years, but of course the Bolsheviks could not allow such an imposing cathedral to function in the very cradle of the revolution.

The first blow came in 1922, when the cathedral was looted. As part of a campaign to “expropriate church valuables,” but also as simple pillaging, 48 kilograms of gold and two tons of silver decorations were removed from the church. Soon after that its abbot was arrested. In 1928, services were terminated and, to add insult to injury, the cathedral was turned into a “Museum of Religion and Atheism.” In 1931 a giant, 98-meter Foucault pendulum was installed under the dome as a demonstration of the Earth’s rotation. This was apparently the Soviet government’s way of engaging in dialogue with both Galileo and the Vatican.

Decades later, history took another sharp turn. After perestroika St. Isaac’s continued to serve as a museum (although the Foucault pendulum was put into storage), and services began to be held there once again. The Russian Orthodox Church complained that it was given few opportunities to hold services in the cathedral, and in recent years there has been a struggle for control. The ROC demanded that St. Isaac’s be placed under its control, along with two other outstanding specimens of St. Petersburg architecture – the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, built at the site of Alexander II’s assassination, and the Smolny Cathedral.

The passions surrounding St. Isaac’s are quite illustrative of life in Russia today. The Russian Orthodox Church organized a demonstrative procession of the cross around the cathedral by “Orthodox activists” that included a motley assortment of bikers, soccer fans, and Cossacks. In response, locals formed a human chain around the church, demanding that it remain a museum.

You might think that the ROC would triumph here, since it is not easy to argue with the Church these days in Russia. But it was recently reported that “the question of whether St. Isaac’s will be transferred to the Church is no longer under consideration.” Why? Who made that decision? What will happen now?

It seems that there are yet a few chapters ahead in the cathedral’s troubled history.