Why was st. petersburg founded

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By continuing to use our Website, you accept our use of cookies, the terms of our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. I agree. History of St. Petersburg Russia. Home History of St. Petersburg By era St. Petersburg in the era of Peter the Great.

Petersburg in the era of Peter the Great It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Peter the Great on the founding and formation of St. To begin with, Peter himself chose the site of the new city, laying the foundation stone for the Peter Paul Fortress and the city at its walls in May Peter the Great considering the building of St.

Petersburg on the shore of the Baltic Sea. The founding of St. Petersburg by Peter the Great. Ceremonial entrance of four Swedish frigates to the Neva after the Victory of Grengam, 8 September Winter Palace of Peter the Great. View of the Summer Garden from the Neva River.

View of Catherinehof. The small Winter Mansion of Peter the Great in Reconstructed by Grigoriy Mikhailov. Built in the s with a baroque yellow-and-white facade, the inside of the mansion was adorned with European furnishings and works by artists including Raphael, Van Dyck and Rembrandt.

The family trained hundreds of them as artists, craftsmen and performers each year, and its theatrical troupe was the foremost in the nation. Urban planning mistakes continue to plague the city to this day, albeit with less momentous consequences.

St Petersburg once had more than miles of tram lines , the largest such network in the world — but many of these have been torn up since the Soviet breakup. Meanwhile, the downtown has its own problems, even though the entire historic centre is a Unesco world heritage site.

According to the architectural preservation group Lively City, 10 to 15 historic buildings are lost each year, ruined in bad-faith renovations or simply torn down to make way for new-builds. The authorities have even been found to be complicit in prohibited demolitions.

The building was once the home of the great admiral Nikolai Mordvinov and is protected as a monument of regional significance. But the bete noir of local activists is the Lakhta Centre , a new headquarters for the state gas champion Gazprom that is planned to be the tallest building in Europe upon completion in — in a city with no other skyscrapers.

Many activists still see this as a defeat, since the Gazprom tower will nonetheless alter the skyline that is visible from the promenades that line every river and canal. No longer the capital of Russia Lenin won that argument , the city remains famous for all the reasons Peter had hoped.

Peter had a fast intellect but an even stronger penchant for doing. He was very big — almost seven feet tall. He was so strong that he could twist silver platters at banquets and roll them up into scrolls. He could cut a cloth, thrown in the air, in half with his sword — or even slice an air-borne dinner napkin into two parts with his knife.

His hands were covered with calluses; he never entered a factory without learning how to work every machine. Peter was only 10 years old when he became czar. As an impressionable year-old, he traveled to the Netherlands where he worked as a laborer in a shipyard.

They were not wrong; Peter achieved the status of master-craftsman in 14 different trades. Even in the quiet of his rooms, if they were ever quiet, Peter worked with his hands. After he died, objects found included scores of model boats, hand-made chairs, even a small container of teeth he had extracted from unfortunate volunteers while practicing with and developing new tools for dentistry.

Peter had an interest in Europe. In , he toured the continent and returned with a new vision of what Russia could be. The whole art, at first, was imported. Jean-Baptiste Lande gave a recital of his ballet students that led to the founding of a Russian ballet school in , which grew into the famed St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet School.

Petersburg Bolshoi Theater later called the Maryinsky and still later the Kirov became showcasing the great innovations and artistic achievements of Russian ballet. Did all this come from a boy with restless leg syndrome? Young Peter was said to be so constantly in movement or jiggling that he could not sit through dinners without jumping up and going into the next room to stretch.