The Vyazemskaya Lavra was formed on the territory of the Vyazemsky estate, more precisely, on the territory of its wings. The Vyazemsky princes, whose palace faced the Fontanka River, planned to build a series of residential houses on their land for additional income, intended for the urban poor.

The portrait of Prince Vyazemsky has not survived, but the story of his scandalous romance with the ballerina Sofia Koch has come down to us. The romance began in 1835, but there was a catch — the beautiful young woman caught the eye of Emperor Nicholas I. Trying to hide from the emperor, the lovers secretly left Russia.

Spies were sent to search for them, the affair received wide publicity, and realizing the scale of the scandal, Vyazemsky got scared, abandoned Koch in Copenhagen, and returned to Russia to confess, where he was immediately sent into five years of exile in the Caucasus. While the prince was in the Caucasus, managers built 13 stone buildings on his plot, including income houses, warehouse premises, and office spaces, which were rented out at low prices. The constant influx of tenants was ensured by the nearby Sennoy Market.

The network of buildings on Prince Vyazemsky’s territory was ironically nicknamed the "Vyazemskaya Lavra." Lavra is a church term meaning a male monastery of the highest rank. At that time, there were only four Lavras in Russia. But in the den called "Vyazemskaya Lavra," the order was far from ecclesiastical. The area was practically controlled by thieves, and law enforcement avoided this place. The territory around Sennaya Square itself was considered the slums of St. Petersburg.

Prince Vyazemsky tried to squeeze maximum profit from his properties, so no one particularly cared about the reliability of tenants. On average, the population of the lavra was 2,000 people, but the exact number was never recorded and constantly changed. Descriptions of some wings of the Vyazemskaya Lavra have been preserved.

Each wing received its own unofficial nickname, such as "Carpenter’s," "Basket," "Rag," "Four Baths," "Small," and "Large Poltoratsky." In the Rag wing lived and worked cooperatives of rag pickers, whose business was collecting old rags from garbage pits for resale to large factories for processing. The elders of these cooperatives dealt in buying stolen goods, and thieves of various specializations often hung around them. The relatively calm Basket building housed cooperatives making baskets. There were also separate apartments, but living conditions were far from comfortable. An apartment consisted of one room and a kitchen, with two windows facing the outhouse and garbage pit. The outhouse in the corridor was shared by two apartments. There was running water and a stove, but no oven.

In the Bath wing, there were noble "luxury" rooms where thieves celebrated after successful deals, as well as "family rooms," which were actually brothels. The Vyazemskaya Lavra housed the cheapest prostitutes. Police raids were rare, so the need for a "yellow ticket" (a registration document for prostitutes) was absent.

"Glass" wing on the territory of the "Vyazemskaya Lavra," 1880

The largest residential wing was called the "Glass Corridor." It earned the worst reputation because a criminal organized group lived on its third floor. The most brutal bandits lived there. Also, this building housed a food row that provided meals for the lavra’s residents.

Over time, house No. 95 on the Fontanka became part of the Vyazemskaya Lavra. Originally, the Baroque-style mansion was built for Prince Alexander Vyazemsky, later occupied by an office belonging to the Vyazemsky enterprise, and by the end of the 19th century, it housed a children’s labor orphanage that provided shelter and work for homeless children from the Sennaya Square area. The house no longer exists; in its place is the passage to the Sennoy Market and the "Sennaya" shopping center.

Two wings faced Zabalkansky Prospect and one faced the Fontanka. On the territory, there was also a tea house of the inn called "Mouse Trap." It was nicknamed so because the detective police periodically conducted searches and raids there for wanted criminals. Also located here was the Vyazemsky mansion, a luxurious palace that stood in stark contrast to its wings. In two wings on Zabalkansky Prospect were a tavern, family baths, a drinking house, and a dozen shops selling secondhand and stolen goods; in the other four residential wings, there were also baths and storerooms. Residential premises in the lavra were divided into direct and side rooms and consisted of single rooms; part of the room was allocated as a closet for the owners, and the rest of the space was tightly furnished with beds and bunks. In direct apartments, 45 or more people lived, and in side ones — half as many. A direct room was about 9 meters in size and had four windows. The room owners were usually peasants from the Novgorod, Smolensk, and Kaluga provinces or retired soldiers. Hygienist F. F. Erisman pointed out the "horrifying" sanitary condition of the housing, describing the drainage pipes used by the lavra’s residents as toilets. Ultimately, this waste ended up in the Fontanka, whose water was used by the poor population living along the river. Despite the depressing conditions, residents paid 36–38 rubles for such apartments.

The lavra had its own laws, its own authority, and its own survival rules. City authorities were afraid to enter the lavra, and minor offenses were not even recorded there. The local population felt invincible.

The Vyazemskaya Lavra housed prostitutes of the lowest kind. Police raids were rare, so there was no need to obtain a yellow ticket, and thus no need to visit a doctor.

Prostitutes from Sennaya were barely grown-up homeless girls, daughters of fallen residents of the Vyazemskaya Lavra. There were also former "workers" of the most expensive brothels, ready to sell themselves for pennies: alcoholism and numerous diseases could turn a flourishing girl into an old woman in a few years. Thanks to the memoirs of Nikolai Sveshnikov, we know the name of one such sufferer, a slum dweller. Sasha Stolbovaya, nicknamed "Cork," who looked either 40 or 60 years old, dirty, perpetually drunk, with a smashed eye and a face disfigured by beatings, worked from youth in Malinnik, then simply in the alleys, and later begged from merchants at Sennaya. Out of pity, they threw her scraps: herring tails, trimmings, rotten vegetables — she collected all this and resold it among the Vyazemskaya Lavra inhabitants, living off that.

The Sennaya residents were divided by their professions. For example, a very numerous cooperative of beggars with a strict hierarchy and territorial division; a rag pickers’ cooperative engaged, among other things, in the mass alteration of stolen goods; a torchbearers’ cooperative, earning their bread by accompanying coffins with canopies and torches, which gave funerals a noble and official tone.

The lavra was visited by famous writers. The Vyazemsky tavern was frequented by writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and became the setting in the novel "Crime and Punishment," where Raskolnikov met Svidrigailov. In his novel, Dostoevsky described the tavern as "a jam-packed disreputable place with wide-open windows, where songs were sung, clarinet, violin, and Turkish drums sounded, and women’s screams were heard." For example, Vsevolod Krestovsky, who brought his friends there — sculptor Mikeshin and writer Leskov. To avoid attracting attention, they dressed in rags like beggars, sometimes having to fend off criminals who suspected something was amiss. Krestovsky described the life and morals of the Lavra in the novel "St. Petersburg Slums," which tells about the invisible life of the grand St. Petersburg.

Also, Felix Yusupov and his friends visited the Lavra, who decided to spend the night there disguised as beggars.

In 1912, Princess Vyazemskaya proposed to the State Duma to demolish the Lavra, and in 1913 the most criminal "Glass" wing was demolished, and two income houses at Nos. 4-6 on Moskovsky Prospect were built in its place.

Two symmetrically elegant buildings with towers in Art Nouveau style were supposed to open the passage along the new Vyazemskaya Street, which never appeared on the maps of St. Petersburg. And the passage between the houses now leads to the Sennoy Market, which was relocated to the site of the Vyazemskaya Lavra in the 1920s.

Sources:

https://dzen.ru/a/YurQSiDU6heHzTGS

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Вяземская_лавра

https://antennadaily.ru/2019/10/30/sennaya/