3-093-098 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Raising of Columns to St Isaac's Cathedral, 1838. Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, completed in 1858, was designed by Auguste de Montferrand in Late Neoclassical, Byzantine and Greek style. The construction costs totalled an astronomical sum of 1,000,000 gold rubles. It was originally built as a cathedral but was turned into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism by the Soviet government in 1931. It has remained a museum ever since, with church services held in a side chapel since the 1990s.