Nevsky Prospect
The Nevsky Prospekt ( Russian Невский проспект ) is a 4.5-km long street in the historic center of St. Petersburg and one of the most famous streets of Russia . The road was laid out between 1711 and 1721 as a link between the Admiralty in the west and the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in the east of the city. From the middle of the 18th century it developed into a boulevard , when the numerous resident aristocrats had their residences built here.
Historic palaces, the large Lutheran St. Peter's Church , a Roman Catholic church, the Russian Orthodox Kazan Cathedral , numerous cafés, museums and cinemas, as well as the Gostiny department store building dating from 1785 can be found on Nevsky Prospect to this day Dwor and the Art Nouveau building of the Jelissejew delicatessen store . The luxurious Grand Hotel Europe is also located on Nevsky Prospect.
geography
location
Nevsky Prospect runs through the part of downtown Petersburg on the left bank of the Neva River and is not only a representative historical street, but also an important traffic artery. The beginning of the prospectus in the west is the intersection of the Admiralty prospectus with the palace square . From the same intersection branches off in a north-westerly direction to the palace bridge over the Neva, a few hundred meters away , to the left of this bridge is the monumental building of the Admiralty, which was intended as its western end point when the Nevsky Prospect was built.
From the Palace Square the prospect runs largely in a straight line in a south-easterly direction and crosses three smaller bodies of water on this route: the Moika River over the Green Bridge , the Griboyedov Canal over the Kazan Bridge and the Fontanka River over the Anichkov Bridge . After about three kilometers, the Nevsky Prospect is crossed by the Ligowski Prospect, part of the old road to Novgorod , and in this area forms the place of the uprising. To the east of this square begins the old part of the prospectus, which was built at the beginning of the 18th century under the auspices of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Even today, this section between Uprising Square and the monastery is commonly known as Old Nevsky Prospect (Russian Староневский проспект ). After the street makes a bend towards the south shortly after the place of the uprising, the prospectus runs straight again until it ends after a little over a kilometer at the confluence with Alexander-Nevsky-Platz. The access to the Alexander Nevsky Bridge over the Neva begins immediately to the east of this square .
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In addition to its function as a road which, together with the two Neva bridges at their ends, provides a continuous connection between Vasilyevsky Island and Petrograd Island in the west and the extensive industrial and residential areas on the right bank of the Neva in the east, the Nevsky Prospect is also an important public transport hub. The first horse busses drove on the prospectus as early as 1847, and in 1862 they were supplemented by a horse-drawn railway line , the tracks of which were tested by steam trams on some sections from 1881 onwards. The first line of the Saint Petersburg electric tram, which went into operation in 1907 , also ran here, as did a line of motorized buses introduced in Saint Petersburg in the same year . Trolleybuses have also been running on the prospectus since 1936 . In favor of the trolleybus operation, which from its inception on the entire prospect between the Admiralty and Alexander Nevsky Square, tram tracks on Nevsky prospect were decommissioned and dismantled between 1950 and 1952. Finally, in 1955, what was then the northern terminus of the city's first metro line - the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station - was completed under the Uprising Square .
The current range of public transport on Nevsky Prospect includes eleven bus lines and nine trolleybus lines as well as six subway stations - in addition to the Ploshchad Vosstaniya station on metro line 1 , which opened in 1955, there is also the subway station that also connects the place of the uprising Majakovskaya the line 3 , further, the two subway stations under the Alexander Nevsky Square ( Ploschtschad Alexandra Newskowo-1 the line 3 and Ploschtschad Alexandra Newskowo-2 of the line 4 ) and the stations Newski prospectus of the line 2 and Gostiny Dwor line 3 on the western section of the prospectus. In the immediate vicinity of the western end of the prospectus is also the Admiralteiskaya subway station on line 5 .
One of the most important long-distance train stations in the city - the Moscow terminus , from which trains to Moscow and numerous other places south and south-east of Petersburg depart - is located on the south side of Uprising Square and thus also on Nevsky Prospect.
history
Surname
The current name of the street is derived directly from the historical role of the prospectus as a connecting road to and from the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, which is located at the eastern end of the prospectus. When it was relocated in the 1710s, the street was initially only called Weg zum Alexander Nevsky Monastery or, in official notation, also (Great) Perspective Street to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery ( Большая першпективная дорога к Александро-Невскомт ). The latter name was then abbreviated in 1738 as (Large) Nevsky Perspective ( Большая Невская першпектива ), until finally in 1776 the word “perspective” was replaced by the synonymous but easier to pronounce “prospect”. Meanwhile, in Russia, a prospect is any large, straight main street in a city (an example is the Kutuzov prospect in Moscow).
In October 1918, on the first anniversary of the October Revolution , under the new Soviet power , the main line was given the name Prospect of October 25 ( Проспект 25-го Октября ). This name officially lasted for over twenty years, but could not establish itself in common parlance. As a result, it was decided to reintroduce the old name on January 13, 1944.
History of origin
Empress Anna moved the city center from what is now known as the Petrograd side to the Admiralty side of the Neva, and in the 1710s built the Nevsky Prospect there, among other things . Only then did the relatively late use of the territories southeast of the Neva Delta begin, in contrast to the Petrograd Island and the Rabbit Island , where the Peter and Paul Fortress was built when the city was founded.
One of the first St. Petersburg buildings to the left of the Neva is the Alexander Nevsky Monastery , which was founded in July 1710 on the initiative of the city's founder, Peter I “the Great” . The choice of location for the monastery is explained by the fact that the Novgorod prince Alexander Nevsky, who is revered as a Russian national hero , is said to have won the battle of the Neva over the Swedes in 1240 . Accordingly, the monastery, which later gave the Nevsky Prospekt his name and 1797 as one of the up to now very few Russian Orthodox monasteries was the rank of Lavra got the sainted prince consecrated.
The construction of the monastery took about a decade. During this time, a continuous road connection between the monastery, which is increasingly known as a place of pilgrimage, and the secular center of the newly founded Russian capital became necessary. In the meantime, on the left bank of the Neva, a few kilometers west of the monastery, the Admiralty, a new architectural dominant feature of the capital, had emerged. Long before the city was founded, the middle way between them was the old trade route to Novgorod, at that time also the only connecting route between Petersburg and the rest of Russia. Since both the monastery and the center of Petersburg needed a connection to this street, Peter I ordered the construction of a Great Perspective Street on the left bank of the Neva shortly after the monastery was founded .
As early as 1711, the laying of the road section from the Alexander Nevsky Monastery to the future intersection with the Novgorod trade route began. This shorter section of today's prospect was built by the monks of the monastery, while the almost simultaneously created connection from the Admiralty to the trade route - including the bridges over the two rivers Moika and Fontanka - was laid by soldiers and Swedish prisoners of war of the Great Northern War . This relocation of the street from two sides and a planning error that probably crept in at the same time also explain the bend that is clearly visible on city maps, which the otherwise dead straight prospectus makes east of today's place of the uprising. The two routes to the monastery and the admiralty were largely completed towards the end of the 1710s. However, due to this mistake, they originally crossed Novgorod Street at two slightly different locations, and it was not until the 1760s that the two sections were connected continuously.
In 1738 the street, which was meanwhile very busy, was given its first official name Newski Perspective Street . At that time, massive stone houses began to be built on. The section between the Moika and the Fontanka, as the street closest to the city center, was most likely to be settled and built on - this is exactly where the Anitschkow Palace , one of the oldest surviving houses on the prospectus, was built in the 1740s . Since Perspective Street was also the most important entrance to the city in the 18th century, it was the first street in the capital to be paved and with two rows of decorative birch trees planted along the roadway (those on Nevsky Prospect up to around 1820, when all the trees were cut down to make them easier to drive on) that had given the shape of a boulevard modeled on the avenue des Champs-Élysées ).
In 1776 the Nevsky Prospect finally got its current name. At that time it was already a continuous road connection between the Admiralty or the Winter Palace built in 1762 on the one hand and the Alexander Nevsky Monastery on the other, and today's ensemble of small ones gradually began on the most representative section between the Admiralty and the Fontanka To form palaces of the high nobility as well as classicist residential and commercial buildings. The continuous numbering of properties and houses along the entire course of the prospectus, which has largely been adhered to today, was established in the middle of the 19th century.
Development
The first representative buildings on what was then Perspektivstrasse included the trading rows built in 1719 on the Moika embankment and the Mauthof built in 1720 in the immediate vicinity of the latter (both were the forerunners of the Gostiny Dwor trading house built on the Nevsky at the end of the same century). These buildings - like many private houses from the early days of Saint Petersburg - were made of wood in accordance with Russian building tradition. This was one of the main reasons for the vulnerability of the new imperial capital to fires, of which two in 1736 and 1737 destroyed the entire district between the Admiralty and the Moika, including the trading rows and the toll station. Then the Urban Planning Commission was created in Petersburg , which in 1766 finally banned any building activity in wood, including on Nevsky Prospect. Accordingly, only massive buildings have been built on Perspektivstrasse since the 1750s. Not a single one of the earlier wooden buildings has survived today.
In 1741 one of the first stone houses was built with today's house 18 on the corner of the prospectus to the embankment street of the Moika, diagonally opposite the baroque Stroganow Palace followed in 1754 according to a design by Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli , the most famous Petersburg city architect of his era. At the same time, on the section of the street closest to the Admiralty, further representative residential buildings were built, which increasingly consolidated the street's unofficial status as the residence of the Petersburg upper class. At the same time, this most prestigious part of the street has also served as the site of churches for several Christian denominations since the 1730s. The German Evangelical Lutheran congregation had its first church built in 1730 on the site of today's St. Petri Church ; 1733–37 followed directly opposite the Russian Orthodox Church of the Nativity, which was replaced by the monumental Kazan Cathedral in 1801–11 . From the middle of the 18th century, more and more representative commercial buildings were built on the prospectus, above all the classicist Gostiny Dwor department store built between 1761–85 . The emergence of such trading centers as well as numerous smaller shops on the lower floors of the residential buildings meant that by the end of the 18th century the western section of Nevsky Prospect was not only a posh residential and business address, but also a widely popular promenade based on the Western European model Magnificent boulevards became.
The predominantly classicist development on its southern side at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century played a significant role in the development of today's ensemble on Nevsky Prospect : in addition to the Gostiny Dvor and the Kazan Cathedral, the new buildings and renovations were the main building blocks by Carlo Rossi - here in particular the current building of the Russian National Library, completed in 1801, as well as the adjacent building ensemble around the Alexandrinsky Theater - significant accents in the cityscape of the prospectus. Up until the end of the 19th century, new buildings and renovations were carried out on this section of the prospectus, mainly using classicist style elements. At the beginning of the 20th century, several splendid Art Nouveau buildings were added, in particular the Singer House (1902-04) and the delicatessen store Jelissejew (1902-03).
While the part of the prospectus west of the Fontanka had largely assumed its current form at the beginning of the 19th century, apart from a few houses, the active development of the less representative sections between the Fontanka and the Alexander Nevsky Monastery only reached its peak from the middle of the 19th century This was mainly due to the opening of the Nikolaus Bahnhof (later renamed Moscow Station ) on the south side of the prospectus in the area of today's Uprising Square in 1851. From this time onwards, more and more hotels and tenement houses were added to the relatively modest residential buildings between Fontanka and the new train station , most of which were executed in relatively simple eclectic forms with only occasional elements of classicism. Likewise, numerous hotels, private accommodations and apartment buildings were built on the Old Nevsky Prospect - as the section between the Nikolaus train station and the monastery is often called. Since the building land on this section of the street has always been comparatively little sought-after, the ensemble of the old part is still much more heterogeneous and, in terms of architectural quality, more modest compared to the rest of the Nevsky Prospect.
In the later 20th and 21st centuries, construction activities on Nevsky Prospect were mainly limited to the restoration and refurbishment of existing historic buildings, many of which were more or less severely damaged during World War II or the Leningrad blockade . Isolated exceptions to this rule are found in particular on the Old Nevsky Prospect, where at the site of several dilapidated that have become and demolished houses from the 19th century, larger houses in the early Soviet era formative styles of Constructivism and later the Stalinist architecture and even some modern residential and office buildings from recent times have emerged. A similar fate befell several historic residential buildings west of the place of the uprising, which were replaced in the 2000s by more or less faithful - and not always positive feedback - replicas. Northern Vestibülgebäude the subway station Ploshchad Vosstaniya the one (1955) and, secondly, the built in the middle of the square Obelisk: also in the ensemble of the square of the uprising two buildings from the Soviet era, now play a significant role , the hero city Leningrad to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of the war (1985).
Attractions
→ See also: List of buildings on Nevsky Prospect
From the palace square to the moika
The westernmost section of the prospectus, which ends at the Green Bridge over the Moika river , was originally one of the oldest parts of the street and was originally built with several representative wooden buildings, all of which were destroyed during the fires in 1736 and 1737. House 18 on the north side of the prospect between Grosse Seestrasse and the Moika embankment, which was built in 1741 by Mikhail Semzow as a private residence in an early Baroque style, is considered a monument of the massive development immediately afterwards . The current shape of this house differs noticeably from the original, because at the beginning of the 19th century the architect Wassili Stassow rebuilt the house and decorated the facade in a clearly classicistic form, which can still be seen today on the two porticos on the left and right edge sees. In addition to the considerable age of this building, it is also known as one of the St. Petersburg places associated with the life of the Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin : In a café that existed here (in the rooms of today's literary café ) in the early 19th century, Pushkin was a frequent guest and stayed here just before the duel in which he was fatally injured. The facade of the Haus zur Moika is striking because of its slightly curved line, which was matched to the uneven course of the river in this area when the house was built.
Most of the other buildings on this section date from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, so that the classicism common in this epoch of St. Petersburg city construction dominates in their architectural style . Typical examples include houses 5, 11, 13 and 15 on the south side and 2, 6, 8, 10 and 16 on the north side of the street. The house 15, which occupies the southern section between the Große Seestrasse and the Moika (and is thus directly opposite the house 18), should be emphasized. It was built in 1768–71 exactly on the spot where the burnt down Mauthof stood until 1737 and a provisional wooden palace for Empress Elisabeth in the 1750s (the latter was removed after the completion of the Winter Palace on the nearby palace square). As a building created in the early days of classicism, it also shows isolated baroque forms. In the early Soviet period, the building gained additional fame as the House of Arts ( Дом искусств ), because this was where the Petrograd Literary Association, founded on Maxim Gorky's initiative, was located, with apartments in which numerous authors of the Silver Age lived. One of them, Nikolai Gumiljow , was arrested in the same house on August 3, 1921, before he was convicted and executed by the state power a little later for counterrevolutionary activities.
The predominantly classicistic development of the section west of the Moika is juxtaposed with isolated examples of later architectural epochs, above all the house 7-9 with its granite-clad facade in the Renaissance style based on the Italian palace architecture (built 1911-12) and the one built as a school building House 14 from the 1930s. The latter is less known for its simplified neoclassical shape, but rather for the sign on the central portal of the facade, which has been preserved since the time of the Leningrad blockade , which warns the population against staying on this side of the street in the event of an artillery fire .
From the Moika to the Griboyedov Canal
This relatively short section of the prospectus was relocated at about the same time as the section west of the Moika, but here and below the street is almost twice as wide at around 40 meters. In addition to representative residential residences, there are also several sacred buildings of different Christian denominations, of which the Russian Orthodox Kazan Cathedral on the south side of the street is a particularly eye-catching building. The cathedral, built by Andrei Voronichin in 1801-11 on the site of an older church, is a particularly distinctive example of Petersburg classicism of the early 19th century with its semicircular 96-column colonnade of the Corinthian order and the distinctive roof dome and with a height of up to the dome cross of 71.5 meters also the tallest building on the prospectus. Less monumental, but also characteristic of this section of the street, are the Evangelical Lutheran St. Petri Church from the years 1833–38 with the two surrounding community halls (houses 22–24) and the former church and community center built in 1831–37 Dutch Reformed Church (house 20, corner of the prospectus with the Moika embankment), another representative of the classical sacred architecture on the Nevsky.
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In contrast to the previous section, however, the local development shows a greater variety of architectural styles than the predominantly classical ensemble west of the Moika. A special feature here is the Stroganow Palace (house 17), which is on the south side of the prospectus on the corner of the Moika bank. This building, erected in 1753-54 by the renowned Italian-born palace architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli , is not only one of the oldest preserved buildings on the prospectus, but also an example of the early St. Petersburg Baroque that has remained largely unchanged up to the present day comes to the fore through the characteristic concave shapes of the roof projections and the facade ornaments as well as the two-tone paint. In addition to the facades, a masterpiece of Rastrelli are several dozen ornately decorated parade halls inside the palace, which were still used as an art gallery in the 19th century and some of them still serve as a museum today. At present, the Stroganov Palace is the only baroque building on Nevsky Prospect that has retained its original style to this day.
In addition, several particularly striking buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are characteristic of this section, of which the Singer House (house 28), built by Pawel Sjusor in 1902-04, should be mentioned. The seven-story house, adorned by an original roof structure with a crown-shaped glass dome and a stylized globe 2.8 meters in diameter, which served as the headquarters of the US sewing machine manufacturer Singer until the 1920s and is now mainly due to the first two House of the Book ( Дом Книги ), a bookstore located on two floors , is a prime example of the Art Nouveau style that was popular in Russian secular architecture of the early 20th century. Across the street is another original trading building from the early 20th century: This is the former Mertens fur goods department store (House 21, 1911–12, architect: Marian Lyalewitsch ). The shape of the facade in this building is reminiscent of Italian neo-Renaissance architecture, but the three arcade-shaped shop windows that together make up the majority of the multi-storey facade are particularly striking. The establishment of these shop windows was made possible by the use of reinforced concrete in the facade constructions , which was still innovative for the time .
From the Griboyedov Canal to the Fontanka
The southern side of the prospectus has only about half as many houses as the northern one on this section, which is due to the fact that it has been mainly built with large-scale commercial buildings since the late 18th century, while on the north side there are only residential houses and smaller offices. and trading houses and a church.
The ensemble of commercial buildings on the south side is opened by the former silver rows ( Серебряные ряды ; House 31), a classical complex of shopping arcades completed in 1786 based on a design by Giacomo Quarenghi . A few meters further to the east is in the middle of the intersection with the Duma street of faithfully reconstructed in the 1970s sechssäulige and completed with a triangular pediment Doric portico that a part of a few years earlier built in its construction 1805-06 spring series ( Перинные ряды ) , another classicist commercial building in this area. If you cross Duma Street in an easterly direction, you finally come to the most monumental and best-known commercial building on the Nevsky - that is the Gostiny Dwor department store (literally "Handelshof") built by Jean-Baptiste Vallin de La Mothe and Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli in 1761–85. ; House 35). The 280-meter-long building, which occupies an entire quarter and, with its two-story open rows of arcades and the central portico made of four Tuscan columns, is an early prime example of Petersburg classicism, served as a model for numerous commercial buildings in Russian provincial cities in the 19th century and is now a noble one Shopping mall. At the height of the Gostiny Dvor, the Nevsky Prospect reaches its maximum width of 58 meters.
Another architectural dominant feature of the south side of this section is the so-called Duma tower (house 33/1), built between 1799-1804, which owes its name to the neighboring former building of the city parliament ( Duma ) and today only has a decorative function. The two buildings between the Gostiny Dvor and the Fontanka embankment are also a sight. The old building of the Russian National Library (House 37), which was redesigned by the city architect Carlo Rossi in 1828–34 , represents the splendid classical ensemble of both this street section of the Nevsky and the neighboring Lomonosov Square a few hundred meters south of it. The Anitschkow-Palais (house 39), which adjoins it to the east and was named after the local Fontanka Bridge , is one of the magnificent St. Petersburg buildings by Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli and, when it was completed in 1741-54, had baroque shapes - similar to the Stroganow Palace mentioned above which, however, were lost during the classicist reconstruction in 1776–78. This palace is particularly well-known, however, because it served as the residence of several grand dukes, which belonged to the Romanov House , until well into the 20th century . The most prominent resident was Tsar Alexander III at the end of the 19th century . who often lived here during his reign. The building with the “Cabinet of His Imperial Majesty” in the forecourt of the palace was built by Giacomo Quarenghi in 1803–05.
For the much more houses on the north side of the section, similar to the same side of the previous section, a row of predominantly classicist residential buildings is characteristic, whereby one repeatedly comes across exceptions with regard to both the building design and the style. The house opening the section on the corner of the canal bank (house 30; one of the entrances to the Newski Prospect and Gostiny Dvor metro stations is located in it) was a baroque building when it was built by Rastrelli in 1759-61 In the early 19th century it was given its current classical form. Immediately further to the east are the two Roman Catholic parish houses (houses 32–34) and between them, in the background, the Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria , the most famous Catholic church in St. Petersburg, built 1763–82 by Domenico Trezzini , Jean-Baptiste Vallin de La Mothe and Antonio Rinaldi . The next building (house 36) is the neo-classical corner house built at the beginning of the 19th century with the Grand Hotel Europe , one of the most famous and noble hotels in Russia. Two houses down (40–42) is the Armenian Apostolic Church of St. Katharina (1771–1780, architect: Georg Friedrich Veldten ) between the two parish halls, another example of the diverse sacred architecture on Nevsky Prospect. In addition, there are two striking Art Nouveau buildings on this section: on the one hand, House 46 - a commercial building built by Leonti Benois in 1901–02 - and, a few houses further, the building of the delicatessen store Jelissejew (house 56), the interiors of which have a similar ornate shape to that of the shop of the same name on Moscow's Tverskaya Street . Another well-known commercial building in this area of the prospectus is the passage ( Пассаж ; House 48) built in the neo-renaissance style in 1846-48 , whose glass-roofed inner gallery with numerous shops and a concert hall was an absolute innovation for Russia at the time.
From Fontanka to Uprising Square
Since the eastern city limits of Petersburg ran along the Fontanka River until around the middle of the 18th century, active development of this section began much later than that of the previous ones, and the area east of the Anichkov Bridge cannot match the representativeness of the local buildings either keep up with the western half of the brochure. The most famous sight on this section is the Anitschkow Bridge itself: It was erected in 1841 on the site of a previous bridge from the 1780s and shortly thereafter received its four characteristic decorative sculptures, each depicting a young man taming a horse based on a design by Sculptor Peter Clodt von Juergensburg .
Also noticeable are the two houses at the intersection with Fontanka embankment, just east of the Anitschkow Bridge: on the south side there is the originally classicist palace of the Belosselski-Beloserski princes (house 41), whose style was being renovated In the middle of the 19th century by Andrei Stackenschneider it was based on the baroque architecture of the St. Petersburg palace and therefore resembles the Stroganow Palace in a certain way. Opposite it (house 68) is a building similar to a palace, but relatively new: it was built in the 1940s as the seat of a district administration in a distinctly neoclassical style with two Corinthian columns and a triangular gable decorated with sculptures in the center of the facade. The special feature here is that the remains of an old palace from the late 18th century, which fell victim to the German bombing in World War II, were incorporated into the building fabric - in particular, the parade staircase of the old building was largely unchanged in the interior of the new integrated.
In the development of the street section east of it, which was largely formed in the course of the 19th century, former apartment buildings , guest houses and hotel buildings play a key role, which is primarily due to the proximity of the Moscow train station, built in 1851, and thus the importance of this street section as a first point of contact for the Railway visitors to the city can be traced back to. The majority of these houses are designed in simplified classicist, neoclassical or eclectic forms, but Art Nouveau can also be found here (house 65, architect: Leonid Fufajewski , 1902-04). At the beginning of the 20th century, a large number of cinemas opened on this section of the Nevsky , some of which - mostly housed in a separate wing in the backyard of the respective house - are still preserved as such today (example: Colosseum (Russian Колизей ); 1907, house 100, architect: Leonid Fufajewski).
Finally, house 86 is worth mentioning, which visually stands out from neighboring buildings with its strictly classical, palace-like shape. In the 19th century, the building belonged to the statesman and art patron Nikolai Yusupov and was used several times for art exhibitions. What is striking about the architecture is the central portico with a triangular gable, with which the architect Mikhail Ovsjannikow decorated the façade facing the prospect in 1814–18. The inner parade halls (today occupied by the “Federation of Theater Professionals of Russia”) were designed by the classicist builder Gaspare Fossati .
Rebellion Square
Today's place of the uprising (Russian Площадь Восстания ) forms the intersection of Nevsky Prospect with several other streets, including Ligowski Prospect, which runs from north to south. This street, which is also important for traffic in the center of Petersburg today, was built at the end of the 18th century on the site of the former League Canal, which had been filled in shortly before. Within Petersburg, Ligowski Prospect follows the course of the old trade route to Novgorod almost exactly, so that the place of the uprising is essentially at the point where Nevsky Perspective Street crossed with Novgorod Street. Accordingly, the section of the prospect to the east is the so-called Old Nevsky Prospect, the part of the street that was relocated by monks of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.
The formerly only sporadically built-up square finally consolidated its status as one of the main gateways to the city with the construction of the Moscow train station (then Nikolaus train station) in 1844–51 . Its reception building (house 85), which takes up the entire south side of the square, is still the dominant building on this almost trapezoidal square. It was built to a design by Konstantin Thon at the same time as the construction of the station and the associated railway line between Saint Petersburg and Moscow . Thon designed the central part of the facade facing the square in the style of a West European town hall, the strictly symmetrical composition is crowned with a decorative clock tower. The side wings and the continuation towards Ligowski Prospect were not built until later expansions, most recently in 1967, when a joint entrance vestibule for the two underground stations connecting the square, Ploshchad Vosstaniya and Mayakovskaya, was set up in the building.
Today's ensemble on the opposite side of the square developed much later: From the end of the 18th century and until 1940 it was shaped by a Russian Orthodox church building, the Church of Our Lady of the Signs ( Znamenskaya Church ; Russian Знаменская церковь ), which gave the square its original name Znamenskaya Square ( it was only renamed to Uprising Square in 1918 to commemorate the local mass protests in the days of the February 1917 Revolution ). In 1955, the northern access building of the Ploshchad Vosstaniya subway station was erected on the exact site of the church, which had since been demolished at the behest of the Soviet authorities. It has a monumental neoclassical shape, some decorative elements such as the central rotunda with colonnade and spire are based on the classical architecture of the former church.
To the east of it, directly opposite the reception building of the Moscow train station, is the likewise classicist building of the Oktyabrskaya Hotel (house 118; formerly named after Znamenskaya Square ), which was built at the same time as the train station and is still the most representative accommodation in the vicinity of the train station holds.
The space in the center of the square is occupied by the Obelisk of the Hero City of Leningrad ( Городу-герою Ленинграду ), a 36-meter-high pentagonal granite stele , which is supported by a symbolic pentagonal gold , erected in 1985 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany Star is crowned and in the lower area is provided with a relief composition with motifs for the defense of Leningrad during the German siege (1941-44). In the years 1909 to 1937 there was a monument to the Emperor Alexander III in the form of an equestrian statue .
Old Nevsky Prospect and Alexander Nevsky Square
The path between the old Novgorod trade route and the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, commonly known as the Old Nevsky Prospect, never fulfilled a function as a city entrance, in contrast to the rest of the Prospect, and was therefore much more hesitant and less expensive to build on. Until the late 19th century, a simple rural architecture predominated here, which was far more similar to the traditional architecture of Russian provincial cities than to the classicist city center of Petersburg. Today you can still see two houses from the early days of the street on Old Nevsky Prospect: These are the two two-story buildings immediately before the prospect converges on Alexander Nevsky Square (houses 177 and 190, respectively).
Even decades after the completion of the Moscow railway station, the Old Nevsky Prospect remained an extremely modest residential area, which was mainly inhabited by craftsmen, smaller merchants and civil servants and, at the eastern end, by the clergy of the monastery and the teaching staff of the monastery schools. It was not until the end of the 19th century that massive houses emerged here, many of which - taking advantage of the location near the train station - were operated as apartment buildings and mostly smaller hotels and guest houses. Some of these apartment buildings were built by well-known Petersburg city architects and have richly decorated facades with elements of neoclassicism or Art Nouveau, as one is otherwise used to from the prospectus between the Fontanka and the Uprising Square. This applies, for example, to houses 140 (1901–02, architect: Alexander Chrenow ), 158 (1874, architect: Iwan Bulanow ), 109 (1878–79, architect: Wassili Nekora ) as well as to the Art Nouveau house 147–149 ( 1905-07, architect: Pyotr Batuev ).
On this section of Nevsky Prospect there are also a number of buildings from the Soviet era and even from the 1990s and 2000s, which are built on properties that were previously occupied by less representative buildings. Some of these newer buildings are themselves an architectural monument of their time, for example the house built in the style of early Soviet constructivism based on a design by the architect Josef Waks (1930s, house 144–146).
On Alexander Nevsky Square ( Площадь Александра Невского ), in front of which Nevsky Prospect ends, in addition to the two two-story houses from the 18th century, the gate church of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery on the south side of the square stands out. Both these houses and the church were designed by Ivan Starow and were built at the end of the 18th century. Around the same time, the square was laid out. Its current name (which with one interruption in the years 1923-56, when the square was officially called "Red Square" in reference to Moscow's central square ) was given after the monastery, which you can see from the square through the parade gate enters the gate church.
With the exception of one of the two houses from the 18th century, the northern side of the square is characterized by the architecture of the late Soviet era: This is where the elongated building of the Hotel Moskwa from 1974-77 is located, which also houses a large shopping center and the entrance to the underground station Ploshchad Alexandra Nevskovo-1 houses. The equestrian statue erected in the middle of the square in 2002, based on a design by the sculptor Valentin Kosenjuk , commemorates Prince Alexander Newski , to whom the monastery, the square and ultimately the prospectus owe their name .
Reception in literature
As the most representative address of the former capital of the Russian Empire , the Nevsky Prospect served many authors as a place of action in their works. The best-known literary work dedicated to the Prospect is the story Nevsky Prospect , written by Nikolai Gogol in 1833–34 , which with the words “ Nothing is better than the Nevsky Prospect, at least in Petersburg; for this he is everything ”begins, followed by a multi-page, seemingly poetic description of the people who shape the audience strolling around the prospectus at different times of the day. However, after the two protagonists of the story are deceived, albeit in different ways, by their initial appearance, the action is followed at the very end by an extremely realistic description of the street, which has little in common with the initial enthusiasm (“ Alles ist Trug, alles is a dream, everything is not what it seems! ”).
The prospectus is also explicitly or implicitly mentioned as the main street of the former Russian capital in Pushkin's poem Eugene Onegin and in works by Dostoyevsky , Nekrasov , Goncharov , Bunin , Bryusov and other classics of Russian literature associated with Saint Petersburg.
literature
- BM Kirikow, LA Kirikowa, OW Petrowa: Nevsky Prospect. Dom sa domom. Centrpoligraf, St. Petersburg / Moscow, 3rd edition 2009, ISBN 978-5-9524-4205-4 .
- AG Mitrofanow: Progulki po Sankt-Peterburgu. Nevsky Prospect. Kljutsch-S publishing house, Moscow 2010, ISBN 978-5-93136-125-3 .
- A. Weksler: Staro-Nevsky Prospect. Centrpoligraf, St. Petersburg / Moscow 2009, ISBN 978-5-9524-4177-4 .
Web links
- Website on the Nevsky Prospect (English)
- The Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg (German, photos)
- Newski Prospect: Magnificent mile full of art, kitsch and culture , in: Spiegel Online , August 25, 2004 (German)
- The history of the prospectus (Russian)
- The Nevsky Prospect 20 years later ; in: Rossijskaja gaseta , November 19, 2009 (Russian)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mitrofanov 2010, p. 23 ff.
- ↑ Kirikow et al. 2009, p. 3
- ↑ a b Hellopiter.ru; checked on March 15, 2011
- ↑ Petersburg-history.narod.ru; checked on March 23, 2011 ( Memento from September 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Mitrofanow 2010, p. 10
- ↑ Spb-gazeta.narod.ru; Reviewed on March 23, 2011
- ↑ Kirikow et al. 2009, p. 133
- ↑ Walkspb.ru; Reviewed on March 23, 2011
Coordinates: 59 ° 56 ′ 4 ″ N , 30 ° 19 ′ 59 ″ E