Located in St. Petersburg which was the capital of Russia at that time, St. Isaac's was the principal Cathedral of Czarist Russia until the revolutionary events of 1917. This is one of the greatest and, at the same time, most unusual architectural landmarks of St. Petersburg. The history of the construction of the Cathedral dates back to 1710 when a small wooden church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia was constructed near the Admiralty. The memorial day of St. Isaac of Dalmatia was the birthday of Peter the Great, so St. Isaac was considered to be a kind of Patron Saint of Peter the Great.

Later, the church of St. Isaac was constructed of brick at another place, and then, in 1768-1802, they built the third St. Isaac's (designed by Antonio Rinaldi and Vincenzo Brenna), but the construction works were never completed. The Cathedral you can see now was designed by Auguste Richard de Montferrand and constructed in 1818-1858. This is one of the biggest buildings with domes in the world (diameter of the dome is 21.8 meters). In addition to very impressing and engineering architectural solutions, including the construction of the dome and the installation of columns weighing about 100 tons each, the Cathedral is famous for its architectural decorations which reflect the best trends in contemporary art. There are excellent decorative sculptures made with the use of galvanoplastic techniques invented in 1838. To decorate the Cathedral, about 20 types of decorative and semi-precious stones were used, such as porphyry, malachite, lapis-lazuli, various types of marble. No wonder that St. Isaac's is often called "a museum of decorative stones".

Outstanding painters and sculptors, such as Karl Bryullov, Fyodor Bruni, Pyotr Basin, Vasily Shebuyev, Ivan Vitali, Nikolai Pimenov and Pyotr Klodt, contributed to the decoration of the Cathedral. The total area of mosaics in the Cathedral is about 600 square meters.

The museum exhibits in the Cathedral show the history of construction and reconstruction of this outstanding architectural landmark, it engineering techniques and its decorations. From the upper colonnade of the Cathedral which is at the height of 43 meters, you can see the beautiful panorama of the center of St. Petersburg.

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