On 16 May 1703 an earthwork fortress was laid down on Hare Island in the Neva delta, and that day counts as the birthday of St Petersburg. There was no city yet — there was a war with Sweden and a 28-hectare island commanding the entrance to the mouth of the Neva. The fortress never fired a shot in anger, but it became the point around which a city grew.
The tour is two hours across the fortress grounds and inside the Peter and Paul Cathedral. We begin at the Ioannovsky Bridge, by which St Petersburg’s first street entered the city, and walk the same way as everyone who came to the island three hundred years ago: through the ravelin, through Domenico Trezzini’s Peter’s Gate, then along the curtain walls to the cathedral and the river.
The fortifications — six bastions named after Peter I and his associates: the Sovereign’s, Menshikov, Naryshkin, Trubetskoy, Zotov and Golovkin. We will sort out how a bastion differs from a curtain wall, what a fortress needs a ravelin and a crownwork for, and why this layout was considered the summit of military science for a hundred years.
The Peter and Paul Cathedral — Trezzini spent twenty-one years on it, from 1712 to 1733, and began not with the church but with the bell tower: Peter wanted his new capital to have a landmark on the skyline at once. The gilded spire with its angel rises 122.5 metres and remains one of the tallest in Europe.
The Romanov burial vault — almost every Russian emperor from Peter I to Alexander III lies in the cathedral. In 1998 the remains of Nicholas II and his family were interred in the Catherine chapel. Beside it stands the Grand Ducal burial vault, built in the early twentieth century once the cathedral had run out of room.
Mikhail Shemyakin’s monument to Peter I — the most contested monument in the city: a small head, elongated fingers, unfamiliar proportions. Installed in 1991, and argued over ever since.
The Boat House — a pavilion built for a single boat. Peter himself called the little vessel he learned to sail in “the grandfather of the Russian navy”, and this is St Petersburg’s first memorial museum.
The Naryshkin Bastion — a signal gun fires from here every day at exactly noon. The tradition dates from 1873; with luck on the timing, you will hear it during the tour.
The Neva Gate and the Commandant’s Pier — a granite portico marked with the water levels of past floods, and the best view of Palace Embankment, the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island and the Winter Palace.
The fortress’s first inmate was the son of its founder: Tsarevich Alexei was brought here in 1718 and never left. The casemates went on to hold Radishchev, more than a hundred Decembrists, the Petrashevsky circle including the young Dostoevsky, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, Pisarev and, later, Maxim Gorky. In all, some fifteen hundred political prisoners passed through before 1917. The prison in the Trubetskoy Bastion, built in 1872, operated as the empire’s principal political prison — we will treat that side of the fortress’s history separately.
The grounds are open and free, but without commentary they are simply a set of old walls. A guide assembles it into one story: why Peter chose this particular island, how an earthwork fortress went up in a single season and why it then took thirty years to rebuild in stone, what the mint workers did in the casemates, how the angel on the spire survived three restorations, and who climbed it without scaffolding.
The tour suits both first-time visitors to St Petersburg and those who have already seen the great palaces: everything else starts here. The route is on foot over level ground and is comfortable with children.
The Ioannovsky Bridge
| People | Price per person |
|---|---|
| 1 | $100 |
| 2 | $50 |
| 3 | $34 |
| 4 | $27 |
| 5 | $23 |
| 6 | $20 |
| People | Price per person |
|---|---|
| 7 | $19 |
| 8 | $17 |
| 9 | $16 |
| 10–11 | $15 |
| 12–13 | $14 |
| 14–16 | $13 |
The essentials of St Petersburg in three hours: Palace and Senate squares, the Summer Garden and the Field of Mars, the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island and the place the city began — told through stories rather than dates.
An hour along the rivers and canals with your own guide: the Venice of the North from the water, the bridges and their superstitions, Chizhik-Pyzhik, and the floods that reshaped the city.
Jewish St Petersburg: the Grand Choral Synagogue in the Moorish style, the history of the community in the imperial capital, its bankers and philanthropists — and how it lives today.
On foot through the imperial capital: Palace Square, Nevsky Prospect and Gostiny Dvor, the well-yards behind the grand facades, and doughnuts in a historic cafe — two hours through the heart of St Petersburg.
