Chesme Church

This guide to Chesme Church in Saint Petersburg opens with a sled arriving one December morning in 1916, carrying the body of Grigori Rasputin to an obscure pink-and-white church outside the city, and traces why the imperial family chose this unlikely site to hide him. It reaches back further to Catherine the Great, whose carriage was stopped on this very road by a courier's news, and to the architect she commissioned to try something no one had attempted in Russia before. Listen for how the candy-striped walls and slender turrets came to replace the usual onion domes.