The Summer Garden: The Originals Left, but the Railing Stayed

Every autumn, the same ritual plays out in St. Petersburg's Summer Garden. Workers wrap the statues in cotton cloth, fit them with wooden crates, and walk away. Passersby stop, take photos, and some ask which storehouse the statues get shipped back from each spring. That would already make a good story. The real one is better.

The sculptures you see in the garden today are copies. Precise, expensive, visually identical to the originals — but copies. The originals, ninety-two marble works commissioned by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, haven't stood here in years. Peter wanted a garden that taught something: every figure is an allegory, a virtue, a season, a piece of state wisdom. He hired sculptors from Venice and Genoa, the finest of their time, and laid out the garden himself, ruling the paths straight and deciding where each fountain would go. Those fountains were later wrecked by a flood in seventeen seventy-seven, and Catherine the Great chose not to rebuild them, leaving the garden without fountains for good.

The marble held up for three centuries. Then the city's climate caught up with it. Damp air, acid rain, and endless freeze-thaw cycles cracked and wore down the Italian stone. By the two-thousands, some statues could no longer be touched by hand. After years of restoration, in twenty twelve, the originals were moved to the Mikhailovsky Castle, part of the Russian Museum's collection, where the temperature is controlled and there's no exposure to St. Petersburg's winters. Now visitors can study them up close and see details three centuries of weather had nearly erased.

Artificial-marble copies took their place in the garden, weatherproof and, to the eye, nearly identical to the originals. And here's the twist that changes the whole meaning of that autumn ritual: the workers aren't protecting the real sculptures anymore. They're tending to the copies. The tradition dates back to the eighteenth century, to the reign of Empress Anna, when genuine Italian marble still stood in the garden and those wooden crates actually saved it from the frost. Today the ritual continues anyway, a living memory of what used to be here.

One original never left. The sculptural group "Peace and Victory," an allegory of the treaty that ended the Great Northern War with Sweden, has stood exactly where it was placed since Peter's time. It's the oldest marble sculptural group in Russia still on its original site — and every autumn, it's the very first to disappear under its wooden shell.

Now, about the railing. If you've ever walked along the Neva embankment and stopped in your tracks, you'll understand why the mineralogist Dmitry Sokolov wrote back in eighteen twenty-four that St. Petersburg's embankments and the Summer Garden's railing deserved to be counted among the wonders of the world.

It took thirteen years to build, from seventeen seventy-one to seventeen eighty-four, commissioned by decree of Catherine the Great. Blacksmiths from Tula forged its thirty-two sections and three gates. Stonecutters from the village of Putilovo carved thirty-six columns out of Karelian granite. The architects Yuri Felten and Pyotr Yegorov designed it. Each section is dark iron with gilded rosettes at its center — light to look at, though it's iron through and through. That contrast, austere form against delicate ornament, is exactly what makes this railing more than just a fence.

There's a legend attached to it: that an English merchant, sailing in during the White Nights, brought his ship up to the embankment, saw the railing, and simply turned around and sailed away — deciding nothing on earth could be more beautiful, so there was no point going ashore. A legend, of course. But it's also said that back in the nineteen-thirties, Americans seriously offered a hundred steam locomotives for it. They were turned down.

The railing still runs along the embankment today, black and gold, the same one Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Brodsky once walked past. Only the sculptures behind it have changed.

The world is enormous and one question is enough to start. moygid dot online.