Hi friends, today I suggest you to visit St.Petersburg Buddhist temple - Datsan Gunzechoinei. Not the temple itself, just the temple yard. Photography is not allowed inside of the temple and if you want to see what is there you have to take a plane or train and go there in person... well, there are some pictures on wikipedia - they must have got permission from the abbot.
The St. Petersburg Buddhist temple is situated on the embankment of the Grand Nevka River. The central entrance to the courtyard was once on the embankment side, but now that embankment has become a noisy and dusty traffic artery, so a side gate is used instead of the central gate. Through this gate you can enter the temple grounds from a quiet lane. There is an information board for visitors just outside the gate.
I studied the information board carefully before starting to look around and study the sights. It was made especially for people like me - that is, for people who know nothing about Buddhism and the rules of conduct in such places. I read that visitors are advised to walk around the temple following the direction of the sun (in a clockwise direction). I decided to do exactly that - walk around the temple, and then around the courtyard, observing the correct direction of movement.
The St. Petersburg Buddhist temple was built in the early 20th century, in the 1910s, for a small Buddhist community. The construction was supervised by a team of Orientalists. The temple was built in full accordance with the canons of Tibetan architecture. The interiors of the temple were decorated by the well-known artist Nikolai Roerich.
A small quote about the temple's architecture, from citywalls.ru:
The walls of the temple are lined with red and purple granite. The entablature, made of red brick, is finished with blue belts with white circles. The three-storey church building is connected to the north with a four-storey tower. The tower is topped by an elaborate gilded copper terminus called the ganjir. The temple is also decorated with an octagonal circle of hardae (the symbol of Buddhism) with copper gazelle figures on each side. At the corners of the main façade are gilded cones, jhaltsan, in which printed prayer texts were placed. Inside the temple there are coloured stained-glass windows of the plafond and fences of the light aperture with Buddhist symbols, the floor is lined with multicoloured tiles.
During the first years of the Soviet Union the temple was open, but in 1937 it was closed. The plaques on the walls of the building were a reminder of that time. In 1991 the temple was handed over to the Buddhist community and received its present-day name Datsan Gunzechoinei.
For a long time the St. Petersburg Buddhist Temple was the most northern temple on the planet and the largest in Europe. Now the title of the "most northern" has passed to the Buddhist temple built a few years ago in Yakutia. All these titles probably do not matter at all. The important thing is that the temple building remains a wonderful architectural monument and a centre of spiritual life for St. Petersburg Buddhists.
I walked around the temple and stayed in the yard in front of the Datsan entrance for a while. The courtyard is small, and it was hard for me to get far enough away from the walls of the temple to photograph the whole building. The blank walls surrounding the courtyard perfectly protect the area from the noise of the city streets, leaving no chance to take a picture from far enough away from behind the wall. In the end, I had to delegate the task to computer algorithms: I took a series of shots and had the processor assemble these frames into a panorama. It was a bit crooked, but it all fit.
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| Smartphone | Google Pixel 3a |
| Location | Saint Petersburg, Russia |