Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments
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How it came to be
Swedish colonists built the fortress of Nyenskans at the mouth of the Neva in 1611. Peter the Great captured it in May 1703, during the Great Northern War, and on 27 May laid the Peter and Paul Fortress on nearby Hare Island, the city's first brick and stone building. Serfs conscripted from across Russia built the city, with Swedish prisoners of war in some years, and tens of thousands of serfs died.
Peter moved the capital here from Moscow in 1712. By 1716 the Swiss-Italian Domenico Trezzini had planned a grid of canals for Vasilyevsky Island, and that year the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Le Blond became chief architect. Baroque building peaked with Bartolomeo Rastrelli's Winter Palace, and neoclassicism took over in the 1760s.
The city was renamed Petrograd in 1914, after the First World War began. The government moved to Moscow in 1918, and the city became Leningrad in 1924. German forces besieged it for 872 days from 1941 to 1944, and more than a million civilians died. UNESCO listed the historic centre in 1990, and the original name returned in 1991.
Travellers who came here
- 1873-03
They reached the Warsaw station at night at the end of March and were lodged in a hotel near the Winter Palace. Alexander II received them on 3 April, and on the 9th he gave a dinner for them in the Winter Palace, which Kume left out of his account.
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