ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIAN FEDERATION.- A fire broke out Friday afternoon at Trinity Cathedral in St. Petersburg and the dome collapsed. The head of the local museum protection watchdog said that it would take at least 18 months to repair the cathedral. The fire also consumed one of the four smaller domes.

Vera Dementyeva stated, "The reconstruction will take about one and a half years. But this is possible given normal financing."

The fire was first reported at 5:30 p.m. local time and it took around three hours to localize it.

Grigory Gorbunov stated, "At the very start we presumed that all the cathedral's domes would collapse. But firefighters did almost the impossible and prevented fire from spreading."

The cathedral was saved mainly because an emergency ministry firefighting helicopter arrived at the scene.

Mikhail Dudko, a representative of the Moscow Patriarchy, said, "The destruction of any a church, regardless of what caused it, is always a great sadness and always a certain symbol, because Orthodox people believe that coincidences do not happen."

The cathedral was built in 1835, and is on the Unesco World Heritage List as part of St. Petersburg's historical center.