Grand Cascade

This guide to the Grand Cascade in Peterhof, outside Saint Petersburg, opens with a mystery: the gilded bronze giant wrestling open a lion's jaws today is not the one Peter the Great's craftsmen raised here in the seventeen-thirties. It traces how the original vanished without a trace as German troops closed in during the siege of Leningrad, and follows the sculptor tasked with bringing it back using nothing but old photographs. The pedestal itself stood empty and dry for three years while occupiers wrecked the palace around it.