The Horses That Were Given Away to Kings

Here's a question almost nobody asks: why, right in the heart of St. Petersburg, on the city's grand main avenue, do four bronze horses stand — each in a different pose? They're not a matching set of decorations. They're a story. Almost a film, frozen mid-frame.

We're standing on Anichkov Bridge, crossing the Fontanka River, a crossing that's stood here for over three hundred years. The first bridge went up in seventeen sixteen — wooden, on piles, ordered by Peter the Great. Back then the Fontanka was much wider, a marshy floodplain rather than today's tidy canal. The bridge wasn't named after some nobleman — it got its name from the army engineer who built it, Colonel Mikhail Anichkov, whose battalion did the work. No romance there, just military logistics.

It became stone only in seventeen eighty-four — about fifty-four meters long, nearly thirty-eight wide. Monumental. But of course, the real story isn't the stone. It's what stands on top of it.

The sculptor Pyotr Klodt designed his four horse groups as one continuous story — four stages of a wild horse being tamed by a man. Look closely: at one end, the horse is nearly breaking free, reared up, the man barely holding on. A few steps down the bridge, it's fully submitted, head bowed. This isn't decoration. It's a drama in four acts, cast in bronze.

To get that precision, Klodt dissected horses' heads and legs to study the anatomy. And one of his living models was an old white horse named Serko — a retiree from the royal stables. A nice image: the great sculptor and a tired old court horse, both working toward immortality.

Now here's the detail that makes this story unmistakably Petersburg. In eighteen forty-two, Tsar Nicholas the First simply gave the first pair of horses away — to the Prussian king, Frederick William the Fourth. No occasion, just a diplomatic gift. The horses went off to Berlin, and plaster copies took their place on the bridge. Klodt cast a new pair. Nicholas gave those away too — this time to the King of the Two Sicilies. Plaster went back up again. Klodt, it seems, took it all with the grim humor of someone forced to redo the same assignment over and over.

The full four-part bronze composition only stood complete on the bridge by eighteen fifty. Eight years of plaster patience.

Here's my favorite small detail: the horses facing toward the Admiralty are shod — they have horseshoes. The ones facing the other way don't. Nobody has an official explanation. But the city has its own folklore about it, some of it fairly blunt — locals have long called this "the bridge of eighteen appendages," and left the counting to your imagination. St. Petersburg is a city where high art and a street joke live two steps apart.

During the war, the horses were taken down from their pedestals and buried in the courtyard of the Anichkov Palace, right behind the bridge. The bridge itself still took damage — its stone posts, parapet, and railings were hit. But the sculptures survived. On the first of May, nineteen forty-five, the horses went back up. That date always stops me for a moment — not after the war ended, not that summer. The first of May, nineteen forty-five. As if someone wanted them back in place before the fighting was even over.

Today the bridge carries trams, cars, tourists — all of it rushing past, the way horse-drawn convoys once did two hundred years ago. Klodt certainly wasn't thinking about traffic jams. But his horses stand above all that motion looking like they're taming not just one wild stallion, but the entire avenue below them.

Ask me sometime about the Fontanka and the palaces along its banks — I know why one of them changed hands more times than any other house in the city. But that's a story for another walk.

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