Earlier in the comments, under some of my stories, I confessed several times - my hobby is street photography of my beloved city - St. Petersburg. It so happened that the last three years of my life, all my free time, I devoted to photographing it. And along with this comes a natural desire to learn more about this or that place, object. It turned out to be very exciting.
Photographer: V. Kononov.
Gradually, reluctantly, step by step, the city began to unfold from a completely different side. Even the seemingly famous, postcard, “ceremonial” Petersburg, with a more detailed and attentive look at it, suddenly became mysterious and unfamiliar. Reading articles by different people, I began to notice inconsistencies in facts, dates, events. I came across questions that discouraged me with their simplicity, and concreteness as well.
For example, you paid attention to the fact that Evdokia Lopukhina, the first wife of Peter I, was sent to the monastery immediately upon returning home of the “Great Embassy” headed by Peter and went down in history as the last Russian wife of the tsar. Since that time, all the emperors took only foreign women as their wives, which is why there was less and less Russian blood in the veins of their heirs. Or. Why exactly upon the return of the emperor from Europe, by his order, more than a thousand of his loyal archers, his elite, personal unit, were executed?
Photographer: V. Kononov.
At first I brushed aside such questions, provocation and all that, but there are more of them and I am looking for an answer to them. Normal, logical answer.
And since I have made up my mind to narrate about the mysterious Petersburg, it makes sense to start this topic from the birth of the city itself.
Let's omit the speculation about who was Peter I in the spring of 1703, a man standing on the banks of the Neva. He returned like this with the "Grand Embassy" from Europe. After 2 years, leaving for only a couple of months, notably matured, growing 20 cm and completely forgetting how to write your signature in Russian.
The main strangeness of St. Petersburg is known, but few people are fully aware of it: having founded St. Petersburg, Peter I "cut a window to Europe." Why a window and not a door? After all, normal people do not walk through the windows, but look. I think Pushkin put it this way for a reason.
Photographer: V. Kononov.
Reading Pushkin's introduction to the Bronze Horseman, I literally document this picture.
Peter I stands on the banks of the Neva, after the capture of the Swedish fortress Nyenskans, the wind, leaden clouds over the river (everything is the same as today) and turning to his companions suddenly declares:
Photographer: V. Kononov.
The second question arises (after the window) why it is here, in the lowland, in fact, in a swamp, on the edge of the Gulf of Finland, and not in the Nyenskans fortress, which has already been captured and which is easier to defend, and it is not threatened with floods.
So high and the oblique wave of the bay falls short. It would seem that build yourself a city six kilometers from the coastal edge towards the mainland.
The answer suggests itself in the lines of the verse itself "… to stand by the sea." But, Peter, what did you not see that the Gulf of Finland is not a sea? That the "shallowness of the Marquis puddle", for another hundred years, will annoy the rapid development of the city. Petersburg was not a seaport, it was Kronstadt! So what made Peter build a city in the swamp? Why deliberately seek difficulties for yourself, where is human logic? Well, he was not a fool in fact!
Photographer: V. Kononov.
In my philistine opinion, by the time it was laid, if it really existed, Petersburg did not have a single plus: neither as a city, nor as a fortress, nor as a port. Its military-strategic position was simply suicidal - the border with Sweden was at a distance of one day's crossing of the enemy army (in 1788, during the next "aggravation of the international situation," Gustav III would almost take advantage of this), and many years later the situation would repeat itself and become the reason Soviet-Finnish war. So why did the city arise in this particular place and at this time?
Photographer: V. Kononov.
Let me remind you of the poem "The Bronze Horseman" by Alexander Sergeevich was written in Boldino, in the fall of 1833. We read:
Photographer: V. Kononov.
"Hunks of slender crowded with palaces and towers;" how in a hundred years, after all, Pushkin asserts, the masses are already crowded? By this time, in fact, the entire center of St. Petersburg, as we see it today, is built up! How is this possible? The Column of Alexandria, the Atlanteans, balls on the Spit VO, at that time standing without a dome Isaac with his giant steps, giant jasper vases in the Hermitage, a gigantic king-bath in the Babolovsky Palace, a stone head in Sergievka, granite embankments of the Neva, bridges, squares, avenues, perspectives and palaces, palaces, palaces. And all this in a hundred years! Without electricity, vehicles, roads, modern communications, in the wilderness on the edge of the Russian state, in places where there was no agricultural land, cities and trade. How did you manage to do this? It is logical to answer, everything was delivered by sea.
Photographer: V. Kononov.
It's true. But let's take a closer look at the sea. A real seaport, as it was, and to this day remains in Kronstadt on the Kotlin Island. Initially, not a single more or less serious ship could physically approach St. Petersburg - it would run aground. The ships reached the island of Kotlin (Kronstadt), where they were loaded onto all sorts of boats and pontoon barges that could pass to Petersburg.
Photographer: V. Kononov.
The merchants swore that the delivery of goods from some London or New York to Kronstadt costs the same as the reloading and delivery from Kronstadt to St. Petersburg, but there were no options. There was a saying among English sailors of the early 19th century: "The path from London to Kronstadt is much shorter than from Kronstadt to the Promenade des Anglais in St. Petersburg." With this it was necessary to do something and dug a sea channel. Attention. In the spring of 1885, the grand opening of the Putilov Sea Canal took place and St. Petersburg finally became the country's largest port.
And so the canal was built. Built for an already rebuilt city, not vice versa.
Continuation: "St. Petersburg - Vyborg. Park" Mon Repos ".
Author: Vladimir Kononov
