50 Fun Facts About St. Petersburg

On which river does St. Petersburg stand?

The city sits at the head of the Gulf of Finland, where the Neva empties into the Baltic.

Which ruler founded the city in 1703?

He laid the first fortress on Hare Island on 27 May 1703, on the site of a captured Swedish fort.

After which apostle was the city named?

The founder's name day falls on 29 June, when the Orthodox Church remembers Peter and Paul together.

What was the city called from 1914 to 1924?

Nicholas II dropped the German-sounding Sankt and Burg a month into the First World War.

What name did the city carry from 1924 until 1991?

The renaming came five days after Lenin's death; the oblast around the city still bears the name.

In which year did a referendum restore the name Saint Petersburg?

The vote was held on 12 June 1991 alongside Russia's first presidential election; 55% chose the old name.

What are the summer weeks called when the sky never fully darkens?

At about 60° north, the city goes without true night from mid-May to late July.

How many days did the German siege of the city last in World War II?

It ran from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944 and killed more than a million civilians, mostly by starvation.

Siege supplies reached the city over the ice of which lake?

The route was known as the Road of Life and only worked once the lake froze.

Who moved the Soviet government from the city to Moscow in March 1918?

The move kept the government away from the state border after German forces had threatened the city.

Which museum occupies the former imperial residence on the Palace Embankment?

It is one of the largest art museums in the world and includes the Baroque Winter Palace.

The storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 is known as which event?

By the modern calendar it happened on 7 November; Russia still used the old style in 1917.

Which skyscraper, completed in 2019, is the tallest in Europe?

It was moved out to Lakhta after protests that the original site opposite Smolny Cathedral would wreck the skyline.

On which island did Peter lay down the Peter and Paul Fortress?

The name means Hare Island; the fortress became the city's first brick and stone building.

What is the name of the city's main avenue?

It starts at the Admiralty and runs east past Palace Square to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

The Bronze Horseman statue stands on which square?

The 18th-century equestrian monument to the founder is one of the city's best-known symbols.

The 1825 Decembrist revolt was directed against which new tsar?

The uprising came a day after he took the throne and was crushed on Senate Square.

Which tsar's 1881 murder is marked by the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood?

He was the third Russian emperor killed in the city, after Peter III in 1762 and Paul I in 1801.

Which Italian architect designed the Winter Palace?

His style is called Elizabethan Baroque, the peak of the city's first sixty years of building.

Who designed Saint Isaac's Cathedral and the column on Palace Square?

The column went up in 1834 to mark the victory over Napoleon; the cathedral is the largest in the city.

Which war does the great column on Palace Square commemorate?

The Narva Triumphal Arch marks the same Russian victory over Napoleonic France.

What was the first permanent bridge across the Neva, opened in 1850?

Until then only pontoon bridges were permitted across the river.

Which 1714 collection of curiosities is sometimes called Russia's first museum?

It grew into today's Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.

Who founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862?

Tchaikovsky was among its alumni; Rimsky-Korsakov taught there from 1871 to 1905.

Which Shostakovich symphony is dedicated to the city and nicknamed for it?

He wrote it while in the city during the siege; it was premiered in Samara in March 1942.

Who conducted the Shostakovich premiere inside the besieged city in 1942?

In 1992 the 14 surviving players of that performance played it again in the same hall.

By what name was the Mariinsky Theatre known in the Soviet era?

Nijinsky, Pavlova, Nureyev and Baryshnikov all danced as principals of its ballet.

Which football club is the city's main team?

The club took six straight Russian Premier League titles from 2018–19 to 2024–25.

Which European trophy did Zenit lift in 2007–08?

They followed it by beating Manchester United in the 2008 UEFA Super Cup, with Andrey Arshavin the local hero.

Which KHL hockey club plays its home games in the city?

The club has won the Gagarin Cup twice and routinely tops the league in attendance.

Which stadium opened in 2017 and hosted a 2018 World Cup semi-final?

It was built on the site of a demolished Soviet-era ground that once held 110,000 for a single match.

Whose 1934 assassination in the city became the pretext for the Great Purge?

Around 40,000 people in the city were executed during Stalin's purges.

In which year did the city's metro open?

Its first eight stations were decorated with marble and bronze before Stalinist excess fell out of favour.

Which city-born poet won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Writing in English from the United States, he reflected on the city in essays like A Guide to a Renamed City.

Which novelist called it 'the most abstract and intentional city in the world'?

His apartment is one of several writers' homes in the city that have been turned into museums.

Who wrote the symbolist novel titled Petersburg?

The book sits in a tradition that painted the city as a nightmarish, inhuman mechanism.

Which 1997 Tolstoy adaptation was the first foreign feature shot entirely in the city?

It starred Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean and was made by a British, American, French and Russian team.

Which Swedish fortress did Peter capture in May 1703 before founding the city?

The Swedes had built it at the mouth of the Neva in 1611, and the small town of Nyen grew around it.

In which year did Peter move the capital from Moscow to his new city?

That was nine years before the Treaty of Nystad ended the Great Northern War.

Which empress made the city the capital again in 1732?

Peter II had moved his seat back to Moscow in 1728; the return lasted 186 years until 1917.

The Twelve Collegia and Menshikov Palace stand on which island?

Trezzini's 1716 plan imagined the city centre there on a grid of canals; only the street layout survives.

What title did the tsar first formally confer on five chess players in 1914?

Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Tarrasch and Marshall were the five at the tsar-funded tournament.

Which river gives its name to the oldest yacht club in the world?

When the water freezes, its members switch to iceboats instead.

Which band did Boris Grebenshchikov found in the city in 1972?

It grew into one of the country's most popular groups out of the underground scene.

Who became the city's first directly elected mayor in 1991?

He took 66% of the vote on the same day the city voted to drop its Soviet-era name.

In which year did the city's worst recorded flood occur?

Water rose 4.21 m above sea level and destroyed more than 300 buildings.

What distinction did the city's main mosque hold when it opened in 1913?

It stands on the right bank of the Neva near the Peter and Paul Fortress.

The baroque Catherine Palace is in which southern suburb?

The neoclassical Alexander Palace stands in the same estate.

Which naval town and fortress occupies Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland?

It is one of nine municipal towns inside the federal city's borders.

Which museum ship is the oldest vessel in the Russian Navy?

It is kept as a symbol of the October Revolution, one of over 230 Lenin-linked sites in the city.