Epiphany, January 6 in Russia's Julian calendar and January 19 in the Gregorian, was marked in St. Petersburg by the Great Blessing of the Waters at a pavilion on the frozen Neva in front of the Winter Palace. In 1905, as guns fired the customary salute, one discharged grapeshot instead of a blank. The shot peppered the pavilion where Nicholas II stood, wounded a police officer and broke windows in the Winter Palace. The tsar was unhurt.
The ceremony commemorated Christ's baptism. Clergy, the tsar, members of the imperial family and the diplomatic corps processed to a small pavilion known as the Jordan, built over a hole cut in the Neva's ice, where the water was blessed while guns fired a salute.
In 1905 one of the guns was loaded with live grapeshot. It sprayed the Jordan, snapped the pole of the naval standard and wounded one police officer. Four windows of the Winter Palace, where the empress and her party were watching, were shattered, and the tsar's mother was showered with broken glass. The official explanation was negligence: a gun that had not been properly cleaned after target practice.
Whether accident or attempt, the incident came at a tense moment. Russia was losing its war with Japan, and strikes were spreading through the capital's factories. Three days later, on January 22, troops fired on a peaceful workers' procession marching to the Winter Palace, the massacre remembered as Bloody Sunday, and the Revolution of 1905 began.
Key people: Nicholas II