St. Petersburg: Church of the Savior on Blood

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood [Храм Спаса на Крови] is one of the main sights in St. Petersburg. Entrance fee is approximately 350 to 500 rubles for foreigners but since my friends and I are students of Russian university, entrance is free! Thumbs up to that.

You can see tons of stalls selling various types of neck-slithering priced souvenirs all over the place, and tourists flooding this area.

Assorted martrushka doll, Russia’s must-buy souvenir to bring back home. 

Showing off our free tickets

Most orthodox churches in Russia is enriched with such inspiring and staggering form of architecture and design skills. Medieval Russian architecture in the spirit of romantic nationalism.

The interior was designed by some of the most celebrated Russian artists of the day—including Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Nesterov and Mikhail Vrubel — but the church's chief architect, Alfred Alexandrovich Parland, was relatively little-known (and Russian, despite his name). Source from Wikipedia

The Church contains over 7500 square meters of mosaics—according to its restorers, more than any other church in the world. Source from Wikipedia… again. At least I didn’t have to burn pocket money to hire some translator/tour guide right?

Literally every corner of this church has artistic murals like these. Fancy how these people painting it.

Picture of Jesus on the ceiling, my bad for taking such lousy pictures since I’m using a typical Canon digital camera instead of those fancy DSLRs.

Another one of the murals

Some artistic wood carvings on the doors that are amazingly geometrically symmetrical

Souvenirs sold in the church

Wanted to get some of these but then.. starting price for an egg is 2000 rubles or more

A small portion of the building was still under construction

Had myself posing next to a pillar since I was arbitrarily motivated to do so. Truly a fascinating church for one who adores architecture and design art.