Tsar Peter the Great founds the city of St. Petersburg
On this day · 27 May 1703
On a damp island in the Neva delta, Peter laid a fortress that would become Russia's window on the West and its capital for two centuries.
On 27 May 1703, Tsar Peter the Great founded the Peter and Paul Fortress on tiny Zayachy (Hare) Island in the delta of the Neva — the act now marked as the birth of St. Petersburg.
The land was newly wrested from Sweden in the Great Northern War, and the fortress was meant to guard it. Around that fortified core, Peter willed a wholly new capital out of marshland, draining bogs and demanding stone where Russian towns were built of wood.
He named the city for his patron saint, the apostle Peter, and looked deliberately westward, away from old Moscow.
Peter reputedly cut two strips of turf, laid them crosswise, and declared, “Here a city shall be.”
St. Petersburg became the capital of the Russian Empire from 1712 and remained so, with brief interruptions, for over two hundred years.
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