Alexander Nevsky Monastery

The Alexander Nevsky Monastery - named for the patron saint of St Petersburg - is the city's most ancient and eminent monastery. Peter the Great made a mistake when he founded the Alexander Nevsky Monastery on this spot at the far end of Nevsky pr. He wrongly thought that this was where Alexander of Novgorod had beaten the Swedes in 1240. Nonetheless, in 1797 it became a lavra, the most senior grade of Russian Orthodox monasteries.

Today it is a working monastery that attracts the most devout believers - a revered and holy place - and the gravesite of some of Russia's most famous artistic figures.

You can wander freely around most of the grounds, but you must buy tickets from the kiosk on your right after entering the main gates to enter the graveyards.

The Tikhvin Cemetery (Tikhvinskoe kladbishche), on the right as you enter, contains the most famous graves. It is the final resting place for so many cultural icons. Like Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, this is where visitors pay their respects to the most illustrious individuals in Russian music, literature, art and theatre. Here is the grave of Ivan Krylov, beloved Russian fabulist. But Tikhvin's most famous literary resident is Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose epitaph is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. 'Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.'

It was in St Petersburg that the 'Group of Five' - Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, César Cui and Mily Balakirev - so defined Russian music with their folk-influenced themes. And it is here, in Tikhvin Cemetery, that all five are buried, as are Mikhail Glinka and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

Now part of the City Sculpture Museum, the former Tikhvin Church contains an exhibition of models of the sculptures and monuments that are scattered around the city.

Facing the Tikhvin across the entrance path, the Lazarus Cemetery (Lazarevskoe kladbishche) contains the graves of several late great St Petersburg architects - among them Andrei Voronikhin, Giacomo Quarenghi, Vasily Stasov and Carlo Rossi. Scholar and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov is also buried here. The St Lazarus Church is a crypt dating to 1761. It contains the graves of Count Sheremetyev and his serf-actress wife, as well as a few other statesmen, nobles, artists and intellectuals.

The main lavra complex houses the City Sculpture Museum and the monastery's 1776-90 classical Trinity Cathedral (services at 07:00, 10:00 & 18:00). Hundreds crowd in here on 12 September to celebrate the feast of St Alexander Nevsky, whose remains are in the silver reliquary by the main iconostasis. Behind the cathedral is the Nicholas Cemetery, a romantically overgrown field where many of the cathedral's priests are buried.

Opposite the cathedral is Metropolitan's House (1775-78), residence of Metropolitan Vladimir, the spiritual leader of St Petersburg's Russian Orthodox community. In the surrounding grounds is a smaller cemetery where leading Communist (ie atheist) Party officials and luminaries are buried. On the far right of the grounds facing the canal is St Petersburg's Orthodox Academy, one of only a handful in Russia (the main one is at Sergiev Posad, near Moscow).