Trinity Square and Trinity Church

On October twenty-second, seventeen twenty-one, the peace treaty with Sweden was read aloud in the wooden Trinity Church on this square. Tsar Pyotr I had sought an outlet to the Baltic Sea; the war had taken twenty-one years of his reign. He had made St Petersburg the capital before Sweden ceded Russia lands along the Neva. Until peace was signed, the new city remained a stake whose outcome could still change.

Trinity Square was chosen for the ceremony because it was then the center of St Petersburg. The Governing Senate, the customs house, and market stalls stood nearby, and ships were unloaded at the quay. The stone Peter and Paul Cathedral was still under construction, while city celebrations were held in Trinity Church. By that day, one hundred twenty-five galleys had been brought onto the Neva—the very fleet Pyotr had built for the war for the Baltic.

The request voiced in the church had been prepared in advance. Feofan Prokopovich, an archbishop and Pyotr’s chief preacher, was to explain why the victory changed the position of the Russian monarch. After the service and the reading of the treaty, he listed the tsar’s deeds. Then Chancellor Gavriil Golovkin, who directed foreign affairs and spoke on behalf of the Governing Senate, asked Pyotr to accept the titles Father of the Fatherland, Pyotr the Great, and Emperor of All Russia.

There was no coronation: Pyotr had long since been tsar. He agreed to accept the new titles, after which church bells rang and artillerymen opened fire from the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Admiralty, and the galleys. The Tsardom of Russia came to be called the Russian Empire. Until the end of his life, Pyotr signed himself as emperor, and this title passed to his successors.

Nothing remains of the church where the ceremony took place. A small chapel with a golden dome by the embankment was erected in its memory, but it stands a little to one side. The former site of the church is marked by a bronze miniature on a stone base beside the roadway along the square’s northern side. It was the vanished Trinity Church that gave the square the name it bears today.