This magnificent temple, steeped in history, is one of the most recognizable features of Saint Petersburg – and of Russia as a whole… Here are some curious facts that you might have never heard of!

1. It is the largest Orthodox cathedral in St. Petersburg – and the 4th largest in the world! (The tallest one is the People's Salvation Cathedral in Bucharest, Romania.)

2. St. Isaac's Cathedral was designed and constructed by a French classicist architect Auguste de Montferrand. Emperor Nicholas I personally oversaw its construction, showing the importance of this grand project.

3. During the construction, Montferrand almost got killed (in November 1837), when the workers were lifting 64-ton dome columns to their full height. The architect fell from the scaffolds, but, luckily, nearby workers managed to catch him.

4. Today, St. Isaac's Cathedral is the most recent building in the style of European classicism.

5. Despite its museum status, the cathedral is still operational and holds daily worships.

6. St. Isaac's Cathedral took 40 years to construct, from 1818 to 1858! The construction lasted so long that it even left an idiom to Finnish language: "rakentaa kuin Iisakinkirkkoa" (which means "to build like the church of Isaac").

7. Auguste de Montferrand died just one month after the construction was completed. That was his last and, probably, the greatest creation...

8. The cathedral's interior is decorated with about 400 kilos of gold!

9. By its opening, the mosaics inside the cathedral occupied an area of about 6,500 square meters.

10. St. Isaac's Cathedral once housed one of the few working Foucault's Pendulums in the world – that clearly demonstrated the rotation of the Earth – but it was later dismantled.

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