The Taurida Palace, now in a neglected state, is famous for its ballroom, 320 feet long by 70 feet wide, and lighted up with 20,000 wax candles.
Among other numerous palaces may be mentioned the Michaelhof, erected by the Emperor Paul with extraordinary rapidity, there being 5,000 men employed daily, and in order to dry the walls more quickly large iron plates were made hot and fastened to them. Yet after the Emperor's death it was abandoned as quite uninhabitable after a cost of eighteen millions of roubles, or three millions sterling.
The room in which the Emperor died is sealed and walled up, and the palace is now converted into a school of engineers.
The Imperial Library is one of the most extensive in Europe, containing 400,000 volumes and 15,000 manuscripts.
St. Petersburg has only about thirty churches, the four principal the Kazan, St. Isaac, the Smolnoi and St. Peter and St. Paul.
The first of these, Kazan, is a copy, though on a small scale, of St. Peter's at Rome, with its colonnade, and adorned with colossal statues. In the interior are fifty-six marble columns, each 52 feet in height, hewn out of a single block of marble.
The walls and flooring of the same are all beautifully polished.
That part which answers to our chancel, in all Greek churches is looked upon as the Holy of Holies, shut off from the rest of the building by a screen, called the Iconostat. This is set apart for the priests: laymen may enter, but no woman, not even the Empress, can go into this mysterious enclosure.
In this church, all its beams and posts are of massive silver, the three doors and arches being 20 feet in height above the altar.
We could not learn, says Murray, how many hundredweight of silver were employed, but doubtless many thousands of dozens of French and German spoons, and hundreds of soup tureens and tea pots must have been melted down by the Cossacks in 1813 and 1814 as offerings to the Holy Mother of Kazan, this Madonna being held by them in peculiar veneration.