While St. Petersburg has been greatly influenced by the street architecture of Italy and France, its broadways have a distinct character of their own and resemble the thoroughfares of no other city. Over streets roughly paved with sharp-edged stones, or the upturned ends of logs, rattle droskeys, whose shafts and traces both start from the axle-trees. The horses wear high hames and the drivers long beards, for Peter's commands that all must shave are now no longer enforced.[145] The pace at which the horses move is a great contrast to the leisurely dignity that characterises the citizens. Over the windows of most of the shops are painted pictures of what men sell within, for many of the customers are unable to read and appreciate this guide. Huge gargoyles shoot waterfalls from rain or melting snow on to the pavements below them, so that much caution must be used in walking about in wet weather. Something of the café life of the Continent is to be seen under the creepers and trees of the pleasant courtyards of hotels. The way in which men kiss each other both here and in the public streets is at first sight rather startling to races trained to keep emotions more suppressed, but there is nothing insincere, and--coupled with many qualities one would fain see changed--there is a certain gentle and affectionate disposition about the Russians that becomes more and more attractive as one gets to know them better.[146] The most prominent, and in some ways the most interesting, building in the city is the Metropolitan Church of Russia, the great Cathedral of St. Isaac of Dalmatia, on whose festival Peter was born. Other statesmen have chosen new capitals but have been satisfied to leave the ecclesiastical centre in the older town. No half measures for Peter. Even the holy Patriarchate of Moscow, sacred to the whole of Eastern Christendom in a sense from making up again the number of five after the western one had lapsed into heresy (from the eastern point of view), he insisted upon sweeping away.[147] It was one of the duties of the Tsar to lead the donkey upon which the Patriarch rode on Palm Sunday, and that seemed to Peter to be putting the relations between Church and State on to a footing wholly wrong. A patriarch once found fault with the shabby-looking European dress of the emperor, who had discarded the flowing robes of the East, and Peter had retorted that he would have expected the head of the Church to be otherwise engaged than in minding the business of tailors. So when the patriarch died he did not name another, and at last when the priests begged that some one might sit in the throne, he is said to have sat there himself with the remark that he would be patriarch. The Holy Synod was organised instead and the Church lost almost entirely its old comparative independence of the State. The synod building is close to the cathedral and the highest dignitary of the Russian Church is now the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg.