Universitetskaya Embankment
Encyclopedia
Embankment (transportation)
To keep a road or railway line straight or flat, and where the comparative cost or practicality of alternate solutions is prohibitive, the land over which the road or rail line will travel is built up to form an embankment. An embankment is therefore in some sense the opposite of a cutting, and...
on the right bank of the Bolshaya Neva
Bolshaya Neva
Bolshaya Neva is the largest armlet of Neva river. It starts near the Vasilievsky Island's Strelka .The length of Bolshaya Neva is 3.5 km, the width is from 200 to 400 meters, depth up to 12.8 meters...
, on Vasilievsky Island
Vasilievsky Island
Vasilyevsky Island is an island in Saint Petersburg, Russia, bordered by the rivers Bolshaya Neva and Malaya Neva in the south and northeast, and by the Gulf of Finland in the west. Vasilyevsky Island is separated from Dekabristov Island by the Smolenka River...
in Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
. Starting at the Spit of Vasilievsky Island, it spans between Palace Bridge
Palace Bridge
Palace Bridge is a road traffic and foot bascule bridge spanning the Neva River in Saint Petersburg between Palace Square and Vasilievsky Island. Like every other Neva bridge , it is drawn by night, making foot travel between various parts of the city virtually impossible...
and Blagoveshchensky Bridge.
The bank was lined with granite
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...
in 1805-1810 (eastern part), 1831-1834 (western part) and the 1850s (near Blagoveshchensky Bridge). It features an ensemble of Petrine Baroque
Petrine Baroque
Petrine Baroque is a name applied by art historians to a style of Baroque architecture and decoration favoured by Peter the Great and employed to design buildings in the newly-founded Russian capital, Saint Petersburg, under this monarch and his immediate successors.Unlike contemporaneous Naryshkin...
buildings of the early 18th century, including the Kunstkamera
Kunstkamera
The Kunstkamera was the first museum in Russia. Established by Peter the Great and completed in 1727, the Kunstkammer Building hosts the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, with a collection of almost 2,000,000 items...
, Twelve Collegia
Twelve Collegia
The Twelve Collegia, or Twelve Colleges is the largest edifice from the Petrine era still extant in Saint Petersburg. It was designed by Domenico Trezzini and Theodor Schwertfeger and built from 1722 to 1744.- Description :...
, Menshikov Palace
Menshikov Palace
The Menshikov Palace is a Petrine Baroque edifice in Saint Petersburg, situated on Universitetskaya Embankment of the Bolshaya Neva on Vasilyevsky Island. It was the first stone building in the city...
, as well as the neoclassical building of the Academy of Arts
Imperial Academy of Arts
The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...
.
The embankment was formerly connected to the left bank through Isaakiyevsky Pontone Bridge, constructed in 1819-1841 in front of Senate Square.
Saint Petersburg State University
Saint Petersburg State University is a Russian federal state-owned higher education institution based in Saint Petersburg and one of the oldest and largest universities in Russia....
(hosted in the Twelve Collegia and several other buildings), Saint Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....
, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (hosted in the Kunstkamera) and Zoological Museum
Zoological Collection of the Russian Academy of Science
The Zoological Museum of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Science is a Russian museum devoted to zoology. It is located in Saint Petersburg, on Universitetskaya Embankment. It's one of the ten largest nature history museums in the world....
are all situated along the embankment.
The embankment was named after the university in 1887.
Sphinxes
A quay in front of the Academy of Arts building, adorned with two authentic sphinxSphinx
A sphinx is a mythical creature with a lion's body and a human head or a cat head.The sphinx, in Greek tradition, has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. She is mythicised as treacherous and merciless...
es of Pharaoh Amenhotep III
Amenhotep III
Amenhotep III also known as Amenhotep the Magnificent was the ninth pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty. According to different authors, he ruled Egypt from June 1386 to 1349 BC or June 1388 BC to December 1351 BC/1350 BC after his father Thutmose IV died...
brought in 1832 from Thebes, Egypt
Thebes, Egypt
Thebes is the Greek name for a city in Ancient Egypt located about 800 km south of the Mediterranean, on the east bank of the river Nile within the modern city of Luxor. The Theban Necropolis is situated nearby on the west bank of the Nile.-History:...
, was designed by Konstantin Thon
Konstantin Thon
Konstantin Andreyevich Thon, also spelled Ton was an official architect of Imperial Russia during the reign of Nicholas I. His major works include the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the Grand Kremlin Palace and the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow....
and built in 1832-1834.