Alexander Nevsky Lavra

This guide to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Saint Petersburg opens with the funeral procession for Fyodor Dostoevsky in January 1881, when tens of thousands of mourners followed his coffin to the monastery's gates and packed the Tikhvin Cemetery inside. It moves through the composers and writers buried alongside him, Tchaikovsky and Glinka among them, then reaches back to Peter the Great, who founded the monastery in 1710 on ground he believed was a medieval battlefield and had Alexander Nevsky's relics carried here in 1724. Look for the crowded gravestones near the gate, where mourners once climbed to catch a glimpse of the procession.