Vosstaniya Square, St. Petersburg

Vosstaniya Square, St. Petersburg

Ploshchad Vosstaniya (Uprising Square) is a major transportation hub situated at the intersection of Nevsky Prospekt, Ligovsky Prospekt, Vosstaniya Street, and Goncharnaya Street. It lies in front of the Moscow Terminal with the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station nearby, serving thousands of commuters every day.

Prior to the Revolution of 1917, the area was known as Znamenskaya Ploshchad (Sign Square), named after the Church of the Sign holding the icon of Our Lady of the Sign. The church was demolished in 1940 to make room for the surface vestibule of the nascent Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station, opened in 1955.

In February 1917, the square was a scene of mass demonstrations and revolutionary clashes with police. After the Bolsheviks took control of Petrograd (the then name of St. Petersburg), they had it renamed (1918) Uprising Square to commemorate those events.

Four years before the Tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, in 1909, a tremendous equestrian statue of Tsar Alexander III was installed in Znamenskaya Square. It was largely ridiculed even by members of the royal family. The Bolsheviks left it in place until the 1930s as a powerful symbol of the autocracy, upon which they removed it (but not destroyed). In 1994 the statue was re-erected in front of the Marble Palace (formerly the Leningrad branch of the Lenin Museum), on the former site of the armored car that had transported Lenin from the Finland Station on 16 April 1917.

The square is particularly beautiful when viewed at night.
Sight description based on Wikipedia.

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Vosstaniya Square on Map

Sight Name: Vosstaniya Square
Sight Location: St. Petersburg, Russia (See walking tours in St. Petersburg)
Sight Type: Attraction/Landmark

Walking Tours in St. Petersburg, Russia

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