The Peter and Paul Fortress

Legal address: Peter and Paul fortress, 3
197046 St.Petersburg, Russia
Tel: +7- (812) 498-05-11
Open: 10.00 - 18.00
Closed: on WEDNESDAY

The Peter and Paul Fortress is one of few medieval fortresses in Europe that survived into the present. Its walls are up to 20 meters thick and 12 meters high. It's the earliest construction in Saint Petersburg, and tt's here that the city began to grow under the protection of the fortress. On its territory is a beautiful ancient cathedral with a 130 feet spire. Though built in 1733, it is still the tallest architectural structure in the city.
For centuries the fortress served as a prison, and is sometimes called the "Russian Bastille". You can visit the prison in one of the fortress's bastions and see for yourself why no prisoner could ever escape its walls.

Founded in 1703, the Peter and Paul Fortress protected the newly-born city of St.Petersburg from the Swedes. It later was turned into a political prison in which many notables such as Dostoevsky, Gorky, Trotsky and Lenin's older brother Alexander were kept.

   The Peter and Paul Cathedral is the oldest stone building in St.Petersburg — the city marks its birthday by the day when the cathedral's construction began. Designed by the Italian architect Trezzini, the Peter and Paul's Cathedral is a burial place of all Russian emperors and empresses from Peter I to Nicholas II.

   The primary attraction within the fortress is the Peter and Paul Cathedral, begun by Peter as soon as the fortress had been constructed, though not completed until 1733. In keeping with Peter's Eurocentric bias, its design follows the pattern of Dutch ecclesiastical architecture rather than Russian. The most noticeable characteristic of this is the cathedral's tall thin spire (121.8 meters high), which was designed specifically so as to best Moscow's Ivan the Great Belltower as the tallest structure in Russia.

   There is a strip of beach between the fortress walls and the Neva and here Peters burgers, sporting the latest in retro swimwear, begin to appear in mid-April or whenever the temperature rises above ten degrees Celsius, standing up against the wall to shelter themselves from the wind and achieve maximum exposure to the sun. Don't freak if you hear artillery fire: it's not the start of another coup, it just means that it's either noon or midnight or, at the very worst, a flood.

Today the fortress is one of St. Petersburg's major tourist attractions and has become the emblem of the city. It is also home to the headquarters of the St. Petersburg City History Museum, which displays collections throughout the fortress complex.