History of the St. Petersburg

Panoramic photography of Strelka Vasilievskogo ostrova and Hermitage.

A few hundred metres downstream from the Liteiny Bridge the Bolshaya Nevka, the Neva’s longest northern effluent, forks off to the right.

“And bridges spanned the waters’ width…” When Pushkin wrote his immortal poem, The Bronze Horseman, those bridges in masonry, wrought-iron and cast-iron spanned as yet only the creeks and canals of the southern section of the Neva delta.

The old stone bridge built over the Fontanka in 1780 became, in time, too narrow to handle the increasing volume of traffic along Nevsky Prospekt.

It may sound odd to speak of lions in the role of bridge supports, yet such a structure actually exists in St. Petersburg. We are speaking of the Lions’ Bridge that spans the Griboyedov Canal where it loops picturesquely in the vicinity of Theatre Square.

The disastrous flood of 1824, vividly described in Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, carried away or damaged a great many of the city’s timber bridges. This necessitated the construction of several new cast-iron and masonry spans in the late 1820s and the 1830s.

With the introduction of iron as a building material, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, bridge construction in St. Petersburg entered a new phase. The first cast-iron city-type bridge appeared in 1806, at the intersection of Nevsky Prospekt and the Moika. In those days it was called the Green or Police Bridge.

In the 1780s work was begun on the granite facing of the embankments of the Fontanka, the widest , and longest southern branch of the Neva delta. In view of the heavy volume of shipping on the Fontanka a number of inclined ramps were constructed on its banks to facilitate the handling of freight.

West of the Kriukov Canal, between the Moika and Fontanka, lay an extensive area known in Old St. Petersburg since the middle of the eighteenth century as Kolomna.

The Griboyedov Canal, formerly known as Yekate-rininsky (Catherine) Canal, runs practically from beginning to end in the channel of what was once the river Krivusha. Its construction was begun in 1764 and completed in 1790.