Anchor Square

Sailors take their oath on Anchor Square, cadets form ranks, and city ceremonies take place. The open space in front of the cathedral was intended for this when the square was laid out. It was used very differently before that.

From seventeen fifty-four, employees of the Kronstadt Admiralty stored enormous anchors and anchor chains here, removed from decommissioned ships. The metal awaited dismantling and remelting. The storage yard lasted almost one hundred fifty years—until eighteen ninety-eight. The square takes its name from it. The exact date when the practical name became the official city name is unknown.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Vice Admiral Nikolai Kaznakov, chief commander of Kronstadt Port, pressed for the construction of a large church for sailors. The commission chose the former anchor storage yard: it stood at the center of the Naval Ministry's institutions and occupied enough land. It was decided to place the cathedral so that a garden would fit around it and a space for parades would remain before its facade.

On September first, nineteen oh two, Archpriest Ioann of Kronstadt, invited to bless the start of the work, held a prayer service here. The entire available complement of naval crews and training detachments—up to fourteen thousand people—was assembled in the square. Immediately after the prayer service, the sailors began removing the top layer of soil. The people who were to form ranks here for inspections and ceremonies cleared the former storage yard for them themselves.

Several years later, naval officers began contributing part of their salaries toward a monument to the fallen Vice Admiral Stepan Makarov, the former chief commander of Kronstadt Port. In nineteen thirteen, the monument was installed at the edge of the new parade space. For its fence, the military port supplied real anchors and anchor chains from its own storage yards. The documents do not allow us to state that they once lay on this very square.

The old storage piles are no longer here. All that remains of them is the name, the open space between the cathedral and the monument, and the later port anchors around Stepan Makarov.