On Nevsky, like an unsteady tide, The evening crowd grows. But the motionless calm sleep Of the Alexandrian column remains. The stern, majestic granite, As a sign of victories, as a harbinger of glory, You stood before the tsar's house. You are higher than the column of Rome, You raised the sign of the cross. Unbreakable, immovable, Your heavy base, And through the roofs of low buildings, Looking ahead of yourself, In the dim fog, You see two ancient sphinxes over the Neva. Eye to eye, silent, Filled with holy longing, They seem to hear the waves Of another, solemn river, For them, children of the millennia, Only sleep - the vision of this place. And this firmament, these walls, And your cross, raised to the sky. And seeing that the red disk Is tilted west, They dream, as - long ago - In the sands, over a fallen obelisk, It burned golden. Valeriy Bryusov. 1909 The frightening sphinx on Voskresenskaya embankment One of its sides is ordinary, while the other is shaped like a skull, the body of the sphinx is emaciated, ribs and bones protrude on the sides. Their gaze terrifies the townspeople. The monument has its own name – "Victims of Political Repressions." And the location was not chosen randomly: Voskresenskaya embankment, across the Neva – the "Kresty" prison – a symbol of those years for the citizens. On the embankment, four granite blocks are laid out, forming a prison window. Five years ago, there lay a granite book, a symbol of the list of lost lives, but it was stolen by vandals. An interesting incident happened to me recently. I remembered the terrifying Shemyakin's sphinxes, which appeared in St. Petersburg on the Voskresenskaya embankment in 1995. It is a monument to the victims of political repressions, and they sit right opposite the "Kresty." I must admit, it's a chilling sight... While I was examining them on the Internet - I saw many other sphinxes from St. Petersburg. The most impressive - the Egyptian sphinxes on Universitetskaya. I decided to learn more about them... It turned out to be astonishing! Here's a brief history of the appearance of Egyptian sphinxes in Petersburg. In 1832, work began on arranging a pier in front of the Academy of Arts. Initially, on the upper slabs of this embankment, it was planned to install two bronze horses with charioteers, cast by Klodt. For the pier, it was decided to use the Egyptian sphinxes previously brought to Petersburg. They were discovered during excavations near Thebes in the sand layers by a lucky Greek archaeologist, Athanase, in the late 1820s and were purchased with the approval of the Academy of Arts and by the decision of Emperor Nicholas I by the Russian traveler and diplomat A.N. Muravyov for 64,000 rubles (for comparison, Klodt's horses cost the treasury 450,000). The archaeologist and world-renowned scientist, who first deciphered some Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Frenchman Champollion, spoke very highly of these sphinxes. France was almost ready to acquire the sphinxes, bypassing Russia, but the July Revolution of 1830 interfered. The French had no time for art. From Egyptian Alexandria to Petersburg, the sphinxes were brought in the spring of 1832 on the Greek ship "Dobraia Nadejda". By 1834, the work on arranging the pier was completed, and in the last days of April that same year, the sphinxes were permanently placed on the banks of the Neva. These sphinxes are amazingly beautiful and harmonious. Of course, they represent immense historical value (being nearly three and a half thousand years old). But it's not just about their ancient history - they radiate some unexplainable divine light.