They say that Countess Tolstaya always ordered the coachman to go around the Palace Square side - she was afraid that the Alexander Column, not secured by anything and held in place only by its gravity, would fall right on it. Some Petersburgers feared the same.
Therefore, the architect Auguste Montferrand every evening demonstratively walked his beloved dog around his masterpiece. Gradually the fears subsided. And now the Alexander Column is one of the brightest and most recognizable sights of the Northern capital. But a great many mysteries are associated with it.
The eyes of these people are extremely accurate
According to the official version, the Alexander Column in the center of the Palace Square of St. Petersburg was erected in 1834 by the architect Auguste Montferrand by order of Emperor Nicholas I in memory of the victory of his older brother Alexander I over Napoleon. At the same time, the king certainly wanted the monument to be higher than the Vendôme column in Paris, exalting the French emperor. And this wish was fulfilled, although not without difficulty.
A suitable granite rock, from which the column was hewn out, was found in Finland, in the Puterlak quarry. Master-masons S. V. Kolodkin and V. A. Yakovlev examined her and came to the conclusion that the stone is good. Somehow a timber weighing about 1600 tons was sawed off from the rock, they managed with the help of levers and collars to move this lump from its place and overturn on a bed of spruce branches, which softened the impact on the ground and reduced the risk of stone splitting. And then by hand, by eye, they chopped off everything superfluous, chipped, polished - and we got a perfectly flat cylinder with a diameter of 3.5 meters at the base and 3.15 meters at the top, 25.6 meters high and weighing 600 tons.
How did they do it? After all, modern stone craftsmen almost in unison argue that even today, with perfect machines and precise measuring instruments, it is practically impossible to perform such work with such high quality and accuracy. And the peasants managed! But, firstly, they worked for at least three years.
Secondly, they used the technique of Samson Ksenofontovich Sukhanov - a legendary personality, whose artel created almost all the granite wonders of the Northern capital: huge balls on the spit of Vasilyevsky Island, and the columns of the Kazan Cathedral, and the famous Tsar Bath, now vegetating in the ruins of the Babolovsky Palace in Tsarskoe Sele …
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One foreign traveler wrote about the work of Sukhanov's artel: “They, these peasants in simple torn sheepskin coats, did not need to resort to various measuring instruments; glancing inquisitively at the plan or model he indicated, they copied them precisely and gracefully. The eyes of these people are extremely accurate. Unfortunately, the secrets of this technique were later forgotten, like the name of the most brilliant master who ended his days in poverty.
The column was raised by … the deceased
In St. Petersburg, the column, as well as the huge stones for the foundation, the largest of which weighed more than 400 tons, were delivered by water. For this the ship's engineer Colonel Konstantin Andreevich Glazyrin designed a special barge. A special pier was built for loading operations. Note that the Russian craftsmen already had a similar experience: after all, it was in this way that the famous Thunder Stone, the pedestal for the Bronze Horseman, was delivered. And therefore, without any special incidents, the barge with a column, towed by two steamers, reached Kronstadt, and then to St. Petersburg.
1250 six-meter pine piles were driven under the column foundation. Then the bottom of the pit was flooded with water, and the piles were cut off at the level of the water table, which made the site perfectly horizontal. And only then a 400-ton block of foundation was erected on it.
This method was allegedly proposed by the architect and engineer Avgustin Avgustinovich Betancourt. He also designed the original device for lifting the column to the pedestal. It included scaffolding 47 meters high, 60 capstans (capstan is a winch with a drum mounted on a vertical shaft) and a block system.
2000 soldiers and 400 workers were involved in the installation of the column. This entire operation was completed in 1 hour and 45 minutes. Moreover, according to some sources, Betancourt himself supervised the work. But there is one catch: the column took a vertical position in 1832, and Augustin Avgustinovich … died in 1824.
Naturally, the deceased could not manage the construction site. Probably, an error crept into the historical documents. Most likely, the builders only used the achievements of the talented engineer, which he used, for example, during the construction of St. Isaac's Cathedral. Nevertheless, this mistake is one of the "holes" in the official version of the construction of the Alexander Column.
Temple ruins barrel
The second tangible "hole" was made by an innocent drawing. It depicts the Alexander Column in the woods, and the signature under it reads: D'aperes nature p. le P-le Grigoire Gagarine. Priutino, ce 4 juine 1833. That is, translated from French: “From nature by Prince Grigory Gagarin. Completed in Priyutino. This June 4, 1833 ".
So, in the figure, the column's trunk seems to grow out of some kind of capital structure, similar to a church, partially already dismantled. Some historians are trying to prove that this is, they say, a temporary utility room, which was used by the builders in the next two years after the installation of the column. After all, its final finishing continued: fine-tuning the form, polishing, building the capital, installing the figure of an angel, finishing the pedestal, installing metal elements, etc.
All this time, it was necessary to store the tool somewhere, to shelter the builders from the bad weather. One could agree with this point of view if it were not for the thickness of the walls, which is clearly excessive for a makeshift. It can also be assumed that the artist, paying tribute to romanticism, has ennobled the nondescript structure, giving it the appearance of ancient ruins. But if this is indeed the remains of an ancient temple?
Is the angel a woman?
The figure of an angel with a cross, made by the sculptor Boris Ivanovich Orlovsky, raises many questions. Historians unanimously argue that the face of an angel was given the features of Emperor Alexander I. Therefore, the column is called Alexander's. And although it is easy to be convinced that even an approximate similarity between the angel and the emperor is not (just look at the lifetime portraits of the latter), most researchers do not try to challenge the generally accepted point of view. However, the profile of the statue is very Greek.
And if you look closely at the figure? Chest, hips, smooth curves of the body - everything suggests that we are facing a woman, not a man. By the way, there is a version that the St. Petersburg poet Elisabeth Kuhlman served as a model for the sculpture. This would explain the features of the angel's figure, but his face also does not look too much like the famous sculptural portrait of the poetess.
There is another version: the column is crowned with a statue of an ancient goddess, only slightly "improved" for the sake of the royal personage - the figure is given a four-pointed Latin cross, the base of which is trampled by an angel on a snake, which symbolizes the victory over the "antichrist" Napoleon. But, most likely, Orlovsky sculpted an original sculpture. At the same time, it is quite possible to assume that the column is much older than it is believed.
Known drawings of Palace Square, made earlier than 1830. And what? The column stands, and the angel is in place, only without the cross, and the snake is not visible. And if this is really a statue of a goddess that has come down to us from a civilization much older than the Greek and even Egyptian?
Peter's predecessors
"On the shore of desert waves …" - we repeat after Pushkin. But were the Neva waves so deserted? Now historians and archaeologists have proven that Peter I did not build his city from scratch. There were both Old Russian and Scandinavian settlements. But there are structures in this area, the construction technology of which baffles researchers.
For example, the Kronstadt forts. There are about ten of them in the Gulf of Finland, and all of them are faced with granite blocks weighing up to two tons. Moreover, the blocks were laid without mortar and fitted to each other so precisely that a sheet of paper would not enter between them. On the blocks you can see the same "poke" - protrusions as on the Peruvian Sacsayhuaman. Such precision in manufacturing is only possible with mass machine production.
But who actually built these defensive fortifications and when? The answer to this question, as well as to the one when and by whom the Alexander Column and some other structures in the north of Russia were erected, we are unlikely to get in the foreseeable future.