Alexander Nevsky Lavra

Founded on the wrong site

Peter ordered the monastery built in July 1710, at the mouth of the Chernaya river — now the Monastyrka — in memory of Alexander Nevsky's victory over the Swedes. The institution itself dates its foundation slightly later, to 25 March 1713, when the first wooden Annunciation church was consecrated.

The site was chosen because it was believed at the time to be where the battle had been fought. It was not. The Battle of the Neva took place at the confluence of the Izhora and the Neva, at Ust-Izhora, roughly twenty kilometres upstream. The city's own encyclopaedia records the error plainly, which makes this the best fact about the place: the monastery that gave the capital its patron saint, and gave Nevsky Prospekt its name, stands in the wrong field.

Alexander Yaroslavich, and where the epithet comes from

Older accounts say he "ruled in the mid-13th century" and was "famed for driving back the Germans and Swedes". Both want sharpening.

• He was Prince of Novgorod from 1236 and Grand Prince of Vladimir from 1252, so his rule begins in the 1230s rather than the middle of the century.
• The Battle of the Neva was fought on 15 July 1240 against a Swedish force camped on the right bank of the Izhora. Alexander attacked in mist late in the morning and cut the Swedes off from their ships. The commander was probably Jarl Ulf Fasi rather than Birger, who did not become jarl until 1248 — a correction worth making, because Birger is named in almost every popular account.
• The Battle on the Ice followed on 5 April 1242, on Lake Peipus, and the opponents there were the Livonian Order — the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Knights — not "the Germans" in any general sense.
• He died at Gorodets on 14 November 1263, and was canonised in 1547 by Metropolitan Macarius.

Older accounts are right that Nevsky is not a surname, but they then attribute it to the river running past the city. It comes from the 1240 battle on the Neva — the river by way of the victory, not the river by way of proximity. The claim that the battle "secured his rule" is also wrong twice: he was expelled from Novgorod shortly afterwards and had to be recalled.

Lavra, and how few there were

Older accounts say lavra is a rank reserved for monasteries of the highest order, of which there are only a few in Russia. That is true, and the particulars are better than the generality. This house received the rank in 1797, under Paul I, making it the third of the Russian Empire's four lavras:

• Kiev Caves and Trinity–St Sergius, the two houses that survived Catherine II's secularisation of 1764 with the rank intact
• Alexander Nevsky, 1797
• Pochayiv Dormition, 1833

The churches, and a figure that will not hold

Older accounts say the grounds house five of the sixteen churches that existed in 1915. The sixteen is right — the Lavra had sixteen churches on the eve of the revolution — but the five is not a figure any source supports. About a dozen church spaces physically survive in the ensemble, of which roughly half a dozen are in liturgical use and the rest are museum or institutional space. The number in use has changed repeatedly over the past thirty years and will change again.

The building dates are also wrong in older accounts, which stop at 1790. Masonry work began in 1715; the ranges were completed between 1725 and 1773; and major building went on long afterwards — the Theological Academy block in 1817–21, the St Nicholas church in 1868–71, the Tikhvin church in 1869–73. The ensemble is roughly 1712 to 1871.

The Annunciation Church, which is not a museum of architecture

Older accounts describe the Church of the Annunciation as housing a small museum of architecture with models of the city's outstanding buildings. No such museum exists or has existed. The claim appears to be invention, and it displaces something considerably more interesting.

The church is by Domenico Trezzini, built 1717–22, with the lower church consecrated in 1725. It is the oldest substantially surviving building of the Lavra, in Petrine Baroque. The lower church is the Blagoveshchenskaya burial vault, called by the city's encyclopaedia Russia's first national pantheon, and it contains:

• the grave of Alexander Suvorov, under the celebrated three-word inscription
• Ivan Shuvalov, Ivan Betskoy, Nikita Panin and Mikhail Miloradovich, along with members of the imperial family
• the gravestone of the Rzhevsky couple of the 1710s, the oldest in the city

The wall paintings were renovated in the nineteenth century and destroyed in the 1930s; the building became a museum necropolis in 1932 and was fully restored between 1989 and 1999. It also matters to the next section: the relics of Alexander Nevsky were kept here from 1724 until 1790, before the new cathedral was finished.

The upper church was returned to the Church in 2021 and the lower vault ordered transferred in August 2023, the Museum of Urban Sculpture being moved out of it. What becomes of the monuments inside, Suvorov's included, was not settled at the time.

The Trinity Cathedral is neoclassical, not Baroque

Older accounts call the cathedral another of the city's outstanding examples of Baroque architecture. It is nothing of the kind. It is neoclassical, by Ivan Starov, who had his design chosen in 1774 and approved by Catherine II in February 1776; groundwork began in 1778, the fabric was finished in 1786, and it was consecrated on 30 August 1790, the saint's feast. The Baroque buildings here are the Annunciation of 1717–22 and the Feodorovskaya of 1742–50, which is presumably where the confusion starts.

There was an earlier cathedral, and its fate is worth a paragraph. A design by Leonard Theodor Schwertfeger was begun in 1719; around 1731, with the work nearly complete, severe cracking was found in the supporting masonry and building stopped. It was ordered demolished in 1744 and taken down to the foundations between 1753 and 1755. The Lavra spent some thirty-five years with a condemned cathedral standing on its principal site.

What the Soviet period actually did, which is the reverse of what older accounts say

Older accounts state that the Trinity Cathedral remained open through most of seventy years of Soviet rule, while several other churches were closed between 1931 and 1936. That is almost exactly backwards.

• 1918: the monastery was closed and its archive, library and assets nationalised. In January that year an attempt to convert it into a home for war invalids met a crowd, fighting broke out and a priest was shot dead.
• 1923: the monks were exiled. The cathedral was run by the Renovationist movement from 1926.
• February 1932: monastic life ended, when the city's monastics were arrested.
• August 1933: the cathedral was closed, the last service held that December. It was used as offices and a warehouse, and in the 1940s part of it housed a housing authority and the State Museum of Urban Sculpture. It was damaged in the siege.
• 1931–36: all the Lavra's churches were closed and the premises given to institutions, hostels and industry.
• 1955: the cathedral was returned to the Church, and reconsecrated on 12 September 1957 — as a parish church, not a monastery.
• Mid-1990s: the monastery was refounded, in 1996 by most accounts, with the cathedral's monastic status restored in 1997.

So the cathedral was shut for roughly a quarter of a century, and the community for sixty-four years.

The cemeteries, and why the famous one is partly a Soviet invention

There are four burial grounds, and older accounts collapse them into "two cemeteries alongside the main building", which is both the wrong number and the wrong place.

• Lazarevskoye, the Necropolis of the 18th Century — burials from 1717, closed in 1919, a department of the State Museum of Urban Sculpture since 1932.
• Tikhvin, the Necropolis of Masters of Arts — opened in 1823 as the New Lazarevskoye, renamed after the Tikhvin church of 1873, closed to burials in 1927, also the museum's from 1932.
• Nikolskoye — opened in the 1860s, still the monastery's and still in use. Anatoly Sobchak, Lev Gumilyov and Galina Starovoitova are buried there.
• Kazachye, the Cossack plot — see below.

The Lazarevskoye and Tikhvin lie on either side of the avenue between the gate and the Monastyrka; the cathedral is further in, across the bridge, with the Kazachye in front of it and the Nikolskoye behind.

Now the thing older accounts do not know. The Tikhvin necropolis is substantially a Soviet-era assembly. Graves judged neither artistic nor historic were demolished to make room, and fewer than a hundred original monuments were kept. Remains and monuments were brought in from cemeteries awaiting demolition — Mitrofanievskoye, Farforovskoye, the Vyborg Roman Catholic — and also from cemeteries that were staying open, including Smolenskoye, Volkovo, Novodevichy and the Nikolskoye next door. A memorial plan of 1935–37 zoned the dead by profession: writers to the east, sculptors in the centre, painters to the west, composers along a path of their own. The necropolis-museum opened in August 1947.

It is, in other words, a curated pantheon laid out like an exhibition, assembled partly out of other people's cemeteries. Which matters for the names older accounts list:

• Buried where they lie: Dostoevsky (1881), Tchaikovsky (1893), Mussorgsky, Borodin, Glinka, Karamzin, Krylov, Zhukovsky, Baratynsky, Vyazemsky, Speransky, Dargomyzhsky, Balakirev and Stasov.
• Moved in: Rimsky-Korsakov, transferred in 1936 from the Novodevichy cemetery; Anton Rubinstein, moved in 1939 from the Nikolskoye a few hundred metres away, out of the monastery's ground and into the museum's; César Cui and the sculptor Pyotr Klodt in 1936; Fedotov and Kramskoi in 1939; Shishkin in 1950, Kuindzhi in 1952, and Glazunov reburied from Paris in 1972.

So of the three names older accounts give for this cemetery, two are original burials and one arrived in 1936. The last burial here was the director Georgy Tovstonogov, in 1989.

The Lazarevskoye works the same way. Lomonosov, Starov — the cathedral's own architect — and Voronikhin lie where they were buried. Carlo Rossi was transferred in 1940, Euler in 1956, Quarenghi in 1967 and Betancourt in 1979. Here the practice was worse in one respect: monuments were sometimes brought in from demolished churches and cemeteries without the remains they belonged to.

The Cossack plot, which older accounts describe backwards

Older accounts call it the Communist Burial Ground and place it "not far away" from the Nikolskoye. It is the Kazachye cemetery, also called the Communist Platform, and it is in the centre of the Lavra, directly in front of the Trinity Cathedral.

It was founded in July 1917 for Cossacks killed defending the Provisional Government — that is, its first dead were on the losing anti-Bolshevik side, which is the opposite of what the name now implies. Communist figures and Soviet intelligentsia were buried here afterwards, burials were suspended in 1938 and resumed during the war for defenders of Leningrad. It holds a memorial to those killed in the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny and a monument to lost submariners.

A memorial that is not here

Older accounts describe a small yellow and white church near the Nikolskoye cemetery containing photographs and objects forming a memorial to the last imperial family. The church is real — the Church of St Nicholas the Wonderworker, by the diocesan architect Grigory Karpov, built 1868–71 in Russo-Byzantine style, closed in 1932, briefly intended as a crematorium whose furnace trials failed in 1934, and reconsecrated in 1985. The Romanov memorial is not. No source records any memorial to the imperial family anywhere in the Lavra.

The confusion is easy to account for. Nicholas II, Alexandra and three of their daughters were reinterred on 17 July 1998 in the Catherine Chapel of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, across the city in the fortress, which is the Romanov burial church. And the family was not killed "during the Communist revolution": they were shot at Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918, eight months after the October Revolution, by a local Bolshevik authority as White and Czechoslovak forces closed on the city.

The relics, and the shrine that came back

This is the development of the last decade and nothing written before it can contain it.

Peter the Great had the relics brought from Vladimir, arriving on 12 September 1724; Alexander Nevsky became the capital's patron, and 12 September is still the Lavra's principal feast. A silver sarcophagus complex was made for Empress Elizabeth in the 1750s from Kolyvan silver, and the relics lay in it in the Trinity Cathedral.

In 1922 the reliquary was seized: the relics went to a museum and the silver to the State Hermitage. The relics themselves came back on 3 June 1989, to the Trinity Cathedral — but without the shrine, which stayed in the museum. A court later refused a suit to compel its return, and the Church asked again in 2020 and 2021.

In 2023 an agreement was reached between the Hermitage and the diocese, approved by the culture ministry. The terms matter, because they are routinely reported as a gift and are not one. The complex passed to the Church in free temporary use for forty-nine years, extendable; it remains part of the state museum collection; the Hermitage may terminate unilaterally if storage and conservation conditions are breached, with a commission inspecting every six months and temperature and humidity monitored continuously. It weighs about a tonne and a half, and was insured against total loss at a sum in the tens of billions of roubles. Packing began at the Winter Palace on 7 September 2023 and the outer sarcophagus and inner wooden ark were handed over the next day, timed to the September feast.

One detail closes a loop. Former museum staff warned that the Annunciation Church's wooden floors might not carry the weight — and noted that the complex had stood on that floor historically until the floor began to give way in the eighteenth century, which is why it was moved to the Trinity Cathedral in the first place.

The three hundredth anniversary of the translation of the relics was marked on 12 September 2024 with a liturgy at the Lavra and a procession the length of Nevsky Prospekt, from the Kazan Cathedral to Alexander Nevsky Square and the equestrian monument there, which is by Valentin Kozenyuk and was erected in 2002.

A working monastery, and a boundary that keeps moving

The Lavra is a working monastery, headed by a metropolitan-archimandrite, with craft workshops and a museum of its own. But the site is divided, and the line between church and museum has shifted repeatedly in recent years: the Lazarevskoye and Tikhvin necropolises and their churches belong to the State Museum of Urban Sculpture, while the Trinity Cathedral, the Nikolskoye and Kazachye cemeteries and the monastic ranges are the monastery's.

The upper Annunciation church went to the Church in 2021 and the vault beneath it in 2023; in July 2025 the diocese asked the city for the Tikhvin church, currently the museum's, on a hundred-year free use, and officials were directed to prepare proposals. Anything written about who holds which building here should be read as a position at a date rather than a settled arrangement.