The Passage (), from the French word passage, is an élite department store on Nevsky Avenue in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which was founded in 1848. The Passage premises have long had associations with the entertainment industry and houses the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre. 19th century The site where the Passage sprawls had been devoted to trade since the city's foundation in the early 18th century. It had been occupied by various shops and warehouses (Little Gostiny Dvor, Schukin Dvor, Apraksin Dvor) until 1846, when Count Essen-Stenbock-Fermor acquired the grounds to build an elite shopping mall for the highest echelons of the Russian nobility and bourgeoisie. The name came from a vast gallery between Nevsky Avenue and Italianskaya Street which provided the main passage through the mall. The gallery was covered over by an arching glass and steel roof, thus giving it a claim to being one of the world's first shopping malls, along with Passage du Caire in Paris (1798) Burlington Arcade in London, Galerie Vivienne in Paris (1823) and Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert in Brussels. The three-storey building of the Passage opened its doors to consumers on May 9, 1848. It was one of the first structures in Russia to employ gas for lighting. Another innovation was an underground floor, where an electric station would be installed in 1900. Although the store specialized in jewellery, expensive clothes and other luxury goods, crowds of common people flocked to see the most fashionable shop of the Russian Empire. A fee of 50 kopecks had to be introduced in order to limit admissions. Stenbock-Fermor conceived of the Passage as more than a mere shopping mall, but also as a cultural and social centre for the people of St Petersburg. The edifice contained coffee-houses, confectioneries, panorama installations, an anatomical museum, a wax museum, and even a small zoo, described by Dostoyevsky in his extravaganza "The Crocodile, or Passage through the Passage". The concert hall became renowned as a setting for literary readings attended by the likes of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Taras Shevchenko. 20th century In 1897 the ownership of the Passage passed from Stenbock-Fermor's heirs to Princess Nadezhda Boryatinsky. A great fire in 1898 necessitated a major renovation, funded by the Crédit Lyonnais, a bank which leased a large portion of the store as its offices. In 1900, the building was revamped, with the addition of a further storey, and refaced in Radom sandstone. The new