Letters to a friend...: Beautiful Saint-Petersburg

Peter the Great is the most famous Russian king or Czar. Why? Cuz of many deeds of his.

Think about Europe in the late 17^th century. It is blooming! Post renaissance time is beautiful. And here is a young and ambitious king traveling and learning about the World around. He is well educated and wants to make some changes. He wanted to protect the country from invasion and also to prove his country great. He is learning how to build ships and already knows how to work with his hands. He built Saint-Petersburg in a strategic place, paying no attention he needed to dry the swamps and make people leave so far north.

He planned this city and invited European architects to be sure this city is up to date and can be compared with the best European cities. Peter built Saint-Petersburg and it changed the country. Sometimes we say he broke the glass in the window between Europe and Russia.

The location of the city is important strategically. This is a key spot to protect the country from invasion from Europe. But it was challenging as this location was in the middle of the swamps.

If we move this city to the America continent, we find it about 50 miles south of Anchorage and far north of Vancouver! Yeah… Gulfstream makes the climate here milder than Alaska, but it is still far northern than most of the city around the globe.

It is big. Generally, it is comparable in size with Denver if we take it from Highland Range to Broomfield. There are almost 6 million people leaving there today (close to 7 with surrounding areas). Compare it with 3.5 million in the Denver metro area.

It sits on the banks of the Neva river in its delta. So there is a lot of water there and this is why they often call Saint Petersburg the Venice of the North. There are natural rivers and creeks along with hand made canals created to dry the swamps. There are about 100 rivers and 300 bridges inside city limits. And who knows how many islands ;) Wherever you go, earlier or later you always end up seeing another river crossing your way and it’s gonna to happen during our journey too.

And let’s start from looking across the Neva river, the main water artery of the city. It’s wide and cold. It’s beautiful and dangerous. 7 bridges are crossing the river inside city limits and they are serving as very important streets. But the river itself is a huge street for cargo ships that are moving from one part of the world to another. That is why all these bridges can be opened to provide a free way for these ships. It usually happens every night during Summer time and the only day you can see one bridge open in a day light is Navy day.

The very first construction built by Peter the Great was a fortress – Peter and Paul Fortress. Located on the small island, it has thick protective walls and some well protected buildings inside.

The one of the oldest and really important is the mint. Built almost 300 years ago and still serving as at day one – they still mint coins here.

Another old one is the Peter and Paul’s Cathedral – the very first stone building of the city, still has one of the tallest spire and really stays up compared with other buildings hidden behind the walls. Has an amazing interior too.

Now let’s just jump across the river and look to the king’s palace. This one was called Winter Palace and originally was built by Peter the Great. The current building was erected later and rebuilt a few times but still one of the finest example of Petrine Baroque style. See how nicely it is decorated and there are 176 roof sculptures, placed here to hide the palace chimneys! Catherine’s the Great started building the art collection in 1764 and now we can find one of the greatest collections of art here and this Museum (4^th biggest in the world) is called Hermitage and World’s famous.

Let’s start from the main staircase and just look to the ceiling, isn’t it astonishing?

King’s reception and ball room.

One of the most beautiful rooms in the palace is red boudoir – women’s room decorated in red. The great place to chit-chat about latest adventures, huh?

Czar can have everything in the palace. Want some Italians? Go to the Italian gallery, copy of Florence’s palace gallery.

Ceiling of the throne room looks breathtakingly rich.

There are about 350 rooms available for public’s view in the Hermitage and if you want to just walk along all of them you need to walk something like 15 miles. As I said, one can find everything in the palace. Wanna to see the play? Go to the palace theater. Just walk across the theater hall, open the doors and enjoy the performance.

Now let’s step down to the basement to see some rooms here. And some great sculptures too.

Some exhibition rooms where you can find everything from painting to small art objects. If you want to see all of them and spend one minute looking at each of them… be prepared to spend 4 years of your life looking at the art. Right, four years in 24/7 mode.

There are famous outdoor sculptures just on the back of the palace – group of Atlantis, holding the roof… or the sky?

Hermitage as a museum is located inside a few connected buildings and moving from one to another you need to cross the small canal.

This is a great view from the north windows...

...and another breathtaking from the south. Here you can see the main and biggest square – Palace square with military headquarters on the other side of the plaza. Cool and nicely decorated building with amazing double arch in the middle.

Just a few steps to the west and we can see another Peter’s creation – shipyard. Peter the great was working on battleships here. Shipyard was moved to the north later and now located closer to the Baltic sea, and the building was repurposed as a Navy headquarters.

The main city cathedral is located close to this place. Isaac cathedral is more than 200 years old, built here from north granite (see the pillars, carved from solid rocks and erected literally by hands?). Beautiful and highly decorated building and looks great inside as well. One of the few churches that survived Soviet Union time intact – it was a museum and that saved the cathedral, which is 4^th biggest in the World.

Taking the winding stairs you can climb up to the colonnade and see the city from the high point.

As this cathedral is still one of the tallest buildings in the city, you are now far above the roof level and can enjoy the view. And this is not really the street, but the widest city bridge.

Now let’s move down and look for something else, should we?

The canals can be found everywhere in downtown and most of them have granite embankments and sidewalks paved with granite. It is a very strong stone, hard to work on, but highly resistant to the boots and the weather and its rough surface look just right everywhere in this northern city.

This spot still looks almost unchanged and timeless and this is one of the most beautiful churches that stays in the background.

There were thousands of churches in the city before revolution, but Bolsheviks destroyed most of them. Few survived as museums. A couple were serving as churches. Others were just repurposed and used as storage or offices. One even was used as a swimming pool. This Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood was used as a potato storage, and humidity and fumes of rotten potatoes almost destroyed the interiors. It took more than 21 years and millions of dollars to restore this one. Uniqueness of this church is all décor (outside and inside) are the mosaics. Not paintings, but real mosaics!

What this old Singer sewing machine doing here? Actually... nothing. But it is relevant to the next building I'd like you to meet ;)

Singer office building is a great example of Art Nouveau style. It’s relatively young – just above 100 years old. This was a big book store inside this building for many years and we all had bought hundreds of books here. It is still a bookstore here and now it is even bigger.

Second biggest Saint-Petersburg cathedral is just across the street from Singer building. It was a museum of atheism for 70 years and now it's a cathedral again.

As Petersburg is located so far north, the Summer’s days are really long and nights are short. The day can be as long as 19 hours and there are just a couple of dark hours and other times it is just twilight and one can read the book without artificial lights. This is a special and romantic time and people (especially young ones) spend nights walking along the river’s banks, talking, dreaming about their future and enjoying this amazing view of opened bridges.

Canals and rivers always look different. The winter cold freezes the water and sometimes you can see the rainbow ice. But more common to see the white snow surface and people are even crossing the rivers without using the bridges. Funny time ;)

Walking along the river’s banks is always a pleasure. Looking at the old mansions or apartment houses, some of them have highly decorative facades.

Another example of wall art. This icon can be found on the wall of the hospital and it is made with tiles. Custom tiles create a special look and are not very common.

Another granite bridge is well known because of four sculptures on the corners. Made from iron they show people and horses. And also this is a palace of one of the noble people on the corner.

More water and a gorgeous iron bridge and let's walk along the main street, which starts from the shipyard building and runs for 3 miles, about 100 feet wide in the narrow place and more than 200 feet in the widest.

Some more apartment houses and here is how they look like from the birds eye. They have a shape of belts or boxes and if you stay in this yard and look up, you feel like you are looking from the deep well. So we call these yards well-yards.

Here is another nice place – built by a rich merchant it was (and still is) a grocery store. But the merchant was also a big theater fan, so he built a theater on the second floor of the store.

And if you stay here and wait until the sun is going down, you can enjoy a nice warm yellowish color on this building.

Let’s go again along the small river’s bank. Great views and interesting buildings can be found here.

Some guests like this Egyptian sphinx sitting here for centuries.

Nice curves and huge trees, bell tower of one of the nicest churches, one of a few that served as a church during Soviet Union times.

Some decoration can make you smile – nice unicorn, huh?

Confluence of two rivers and three bridges – this is kinda unusual. And there are two really old buildings in the background – they both were built in the early 18 century and mostly stay the same as Peter the Great saw them.

Unusual Gothic style chapel and Neva river just before dusk…

Now let’s run very quickly across the suburban area and peak to some other kings residences, places where the Czar spent a hot Summers.

Town of Petergoff was founded by Peter the Great to show all the World he can have a place nicer than French Versailles.

You can find more than 300 fountains in this park and this is a really good place to stay during the hot Summer days.

Another residence, cool looking blue and gold building and more gold inside. Some interiors and freshly restored churches that were ruined and stayed without the roof and were half destroyed for decades.

This small palace was built using a very old technique - it was made from the pressed dirt. It was quite common for small houses, but rare for Czar's palace. Now this is the only one that survived and is still available for the public to see.

We can go around forever and see more and more beautiful and interesting places there... But I guess we need to wrap this short tour up and the best spot to do it is returning back, to the heart of the city, to the river on the banks of which Peter the Great built this amazing city...