St Petersburg · Russia

Savior on the Spilled Blood

churcharchitecturehistorygoogle verified

easy

10/10

best: morning

ornate, dramatic, historic

A local would say...

They built this fantastically ornate church on the exact spot where an assassin's bomb killed the tsar — the canal flows right beneath it.

An explosion of polychromatic onion domes built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, a deliberate stylistic departure from St Petersburg's classical baroque architecture that resulted in the most visually startling building in the city. The interior is covered entirely in mosaics — over 7,000 square metres of them — making it one of the largest mosaic collections in the world. The church stands directly above the canal-side spot where the bomb struck the tsar.