Some Nights

part three





For forty years, French architect Auguste de Montferrand designed and oversaw the building of St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia, commissioned by Tsar Alexander I.

Montferrand died in 1858, one month after the cathedral's completion.

While Montferrand's widow grieved, Tsar Alexander I refused the man's last wish to be buried in the crypt of his masterpiece, for Montferrand wasn't Russian, or Orthodox.

The altar of St. Isaac's Cathedral is carved out of lapis lazuli and malachite. I've read about these stones in textbooks but I didn't expect them to be so deeply and painfully vivid; how can such color exist in nature? Maybe I was supposed to spend more time looking at the golden, shining paintings of Christ - they looked like someone had taken a long time to create.

Probably not as long as forty years, though.

My grandma came to stand next to me as I stared at the blue and green altar for the thirty-five minutes we were allowed inside. She whispered in my ear even though every other tourist wasn't bothering to be quiet. She said that she wished she could lie down on the floor and stare, forever, because only then could she truly manage to take everything in. I nodded in agreement and thought, if a man can spend forty years building a monument to a religion he didn't believe in, then we are all entitled to the eternal resting place of our choice.

St. Petersburg has no shortage of Russian Orthodox churches but apparently Moscow holds the more traditional ones. I felt more cheated by the lack of interesting souvenirs than in the European-style churches. I honestly couldn't tell the difference between them anyway, at least not from the exterior.

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood was built around the location of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, thus earning it’s grotesque moniker. The altar isn't made of lapis lazuli but it does have a great origin story, for it was built directly over the pooled blood of the tsar. I wondered if they washed the blood away before they began construction or left it, a morbid stain to mark out the right spot.

The small girl picking daisies in the grass outside didn't know about the blood, and I wished I could have taken her in hand and shown her the lapis lazuli in St. Isaac's instead of merely spying at her from behind the wrought iron gates. Instead I went inside and ignored the floor-to-ceiling mosaics of New Testament stories and gazed upward at the colossal image of Christ's face bearing down on the worshippers. In his arms he once cradled a German bomb, which stayed live for decades yet never detonated, only to be discovered in the 1970s when restoration finally began.

I didn't want to spend forever in the Church of the Spilt Blood. Maybe because it's only a museum and no longer a place of worship, which I suppose made me feel a little cheated, just like I felt cheated out of good souvenirs. Fake Faberge eggs and cheap nesting dolls and vodka were all that any tourist shop had to offer.

Stupid or not, I expected snow and bears in Russia, and although both were conspicuously absent I did find a t-shirt that read "I've been to Russia and there are no bears." Whoever started that stereotype was an idiot but I'd love to meet him, just as I'd love to meet Montferrand and that little girl with her flowers.