Walking the first mile of the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, the visitor is struck by the sight of the Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, German, Armenian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches. These buildings reflect the religious, cultural, and social diversity that has been characteristic of the city since Tsar Peter the Great invited thousands of foreigners from all over Western Europe to build this settlement at the estuary of the Neva River. On the occasion of the third centenary of St. Petersburg (2003), historians and archivists from Russia as well as other European countries convened to study the history of the city’s foreign churches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The resulting studies, published here, offer fascinating insights into the almost forgotten history of those churches and show how substantially they contributed to the religious, cultural, social, and economic history of St. Petersburg.

Contributors include: Archpriest V. Fedorov, M. Fundaminski, P.N. Holtrop, B. Jangfeldt, E.E. Knyazeva, N.S. Krylov, T. Mägi, A. Must, E. Norberg, P.M. Peucker, K. Rundell, V.M. Shishkin, C.H. Slechte, A.R. Sokolov, Th.J.S. van Staalduine, T.I. Tatsenko, J.W. Veluwenkamp, and M.V. Shkarovskii.