automatically. Later in 1717 he visited Flanders incognito and climbed the tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, where he must have heard one of the two Hemony carillons in one of the towers of this cathedral. He was impressed by the sound of a carillon and wanted one like these for his new cathedral in St. Petersburg. So he ordered it in 1720 from the Netherlands. In Amsterdam the only bellfounder at that time, , was married to the widow of Claude Fremy. This Claude Fremy had been a pupil of Hemony. So Jan Albert de Grave was presumably the bellfounder who made these bells. (Some years later he also made a carillon for Potsdam.) The people in St. Petersburg could only listen to this well-tuned instrument for a short time. In 1756 the tower burned down after a thunderstorm. All its bells were lost. In 1757, only one year after this disaster, a new carillon was ordered from Holland - this time by a bell-founder in Hoorn named Johan Nicolaas Derck. He cast the bells, and clockmaker Barend Oortkras from the Hague brought them to St. Petersburg to install them. When he arrived, the tower was not rebuilt yet so he could not reinstall the bells. Oortkras stayed in St. Petersburg, but in 1764 he died in poverty before the tower was finished. This new carillon was installed in 1776 by the German clockmaker Johann Erdmann Rudiger. Rudiger also was hired to play the bells. Bell founder Derck could not tune his bells well, so Russian bell founders recast some of the bells in the 19th century. Audibly, this was not a success either. Thus in 2001 a new set of 51 bells were made in the south of the Netherlands. The bells were cast and the carillon installed by the Royal foundry workshop Petit & Fritsen from Aarle-Rixtel in North Brabant. The carillon comprises 51 bells with a gross weight of ; the biggest bell weighs about , the smallest only . The carillon has a range of four octaves, so most classical and modern music can be performed on this instrument. The Peter and Paul carillon is a gift to Saint Petersburg from the Government of Flanders and from more than 350 sponsors from different countries. The contribution was presented in the name of Her Majesty Queen Fabiola of Belgium, the Belgian King Boudewijn