The Rotunda on Gorokhovaya Street: a stairwell of legends, St. Petersburg's most mysterious address

In an ordinary courtyard where Gorokhovaya Street meets the Fontanka embankment, there's an entrance hall the whole city whispers about. From outside: a grey façade, an archway, a narrow courtyard well. But step through the door, and you're standing in a round hall ringed by six massive columns. A dome rises overhead. Two spiral staircases wind off in opposite directions. Whisper anything anywhere in the room, and it comes back to you from the far side — as if someone unseen were echoing your words.

A striking staircase, unusual acoustics — you might think that's enough to fuel any legend. But then why does one of the staircases climb to the third floor and simply end at a blank wall? No door, no apartment, nothing. Where was it meant to lead?

The building went up between the seventeen-eighties and the seventeen-nineties for the merchant Savva Yakovlev, owner of factories and trading arcades. The architect's name has never been firmly established. The rotunda itself — the round hall with its dome and columns — was rebuilt in eighteen fifty-six by academician of architecture Yegor Ivanovich Wintergalter. The next owner, honorary citizen Alexander Fadeyevich Yevmentyev, bought the building in eighteen sixty. Ever since, it's been known as the Yakovlev-Yevmentyev House.

From the street, you'd never guess the dome is there — it's tucked away beneath the attic, hidden from view. The only window looks onto the courtyard. The right-hand staircase leads up to third-floor apartments. The left one stops at the second floor — and runs straight into a wall. What that space was originally meant for, no one really knows. That dead-end staircase remains the building's great architectural puzzle.

Around the rotunda, a whole collection of city legends has taken root. Guides' favorite is the Masonic story: the claim that around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a St. Petersburg lodge of Freemasons met here, and the walls once carried the symbols of the order. During one renovation, everything was painted over — but people say the marks are still there, hidden beneath the whitewash. Another tale ties the rotunda to Grigori Rasputin: he lived nearby on Gorokhovaya Street and, according to legend, would come here to draw on some kind of special power. Good stories, both of them — and both remain just that, legend. Researchers have never turned up documents confirming either the Masonic meetings or Rasputin's visits to this particular stairwell.

There's another local myth: draw lines connecting every rotunda in St. Petersburg on a map, and you get a perfect pentagon — with this very house sitting dead center. A charming idea, but impossible to verify: the city has plenty of rotundas, and you can trace as many shapes between them as you like.

What is well documented, though, is this: in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the rotunda became a real gathering point for Leningrad's underground scene. Hippies, punks, rockers — anyone who didn't fit the Soviet mold ended up here. The acoustics are strange in the best way: sound travels up along the dome and returns from the other side with a faint delay. Musicians who'd go on to become icons of Russian rock — Boris Grebenshchikov, Viktor Tsoi, Konstantin Kinchev — sang in this very hall. Before heading off to warm up the crowd at the legendary Saigon café on Nevsky Prospekt, this is where people met first. Police would periodically break the gatherings up, and the legend of otherworldly forces luring passersby inside was born, most likely, from stories about those late-night raids.

Today the door is locked with a keypad. Getting inside means arranging it with the building's concierge — groups capped at five people, visits capped at fifteen minutes. That's enough time to stand at the center, whisper something up toward the dome, and hear your own voice answer back from the other side. The physics is simple enough: the half-dome focuses the sound. But somehow, when the whisper comes back, you stop looking for explanations.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.