The school was opened in 1868 as Rozhdestvenskaya progymnasium for girls. Later it became a gymnasium. In 1899 it was officially called St.Petersburg Gymnasium of Princess Yevgenia Oldenburgskaya. There is a museum in our school and its gem is the exposition devoted to the early years of this school and to the family of Princess of Oldenburg. Here you can see a gala portrait of Yevgenia Oldenburgskaya. She was a grand-daughter of Emperor Nicholas I. Her mother was the elder daughter of the Emperor, Maria. She married Duke Maximilian of Leichtenberg. As a present for the newly-weds Mariinsky Palace was built. Yevgenia Maximilianovna married Prince Alexander Oldenburgsky, a representative of another well-known family. Both families were notable for their charity. They took care of  medical and educational establishments.
                There are more than 500 exhibits in our collection, and it is still growing. The exposition may be divided into 5 parts, each telling about a certain period of development of the school. The exhibition devoted to the Great Patriotic War is worth speaking about. Our school functioned during the whole war. In one part of the building an artillery school was accommodated. Here you can see its students. Not many of them returned from the front-lines. But those who came back remember that terrible time. And on the dummy you can see a uniform of a student of the artillery school.
The next section tells us about Leningrad schoolchildren and their teachers, about their life, studies and work during the hardest years of the siege. Despite all difficulties life went all. All teachers and pupils had the responsibilities: to store fuel, to extinguish incendiaries to evacuate the juniors during bombing and shelling (by the way, once a bomb hit the building), to work in the school-plot. The documents, letters, awards, the storm-lantern, the stove, the cast the cast-iron pot with lentil - all these things vividly tell of the atmosphere of those days. And here are scared things - the bread-cards and the bread-ration of the horrible winter of 1941-1942.
After the war our school was often called "Isayevskay". And it is not by chance. Anatoly Pavlovich Isayev directed it for 21 year, from 1944 up to 1965. It was in those years that our school became experimental, the basic school of the Academy of Pedagogics.