“Be Paris and Berlin together!” seems to have said its first owner, forgetting that its latitude lies north of the Hebrides. – Hubert Griffith, 1932
St. Petersburg is one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. The majority of people visit in the summer when the warm weather makes it easy to stroll around and enjoy the gorgeous architecture.
But most of the year Saint Petersburg is engulfed in dark, cold and brutal winters. And in order to experience what it is really like to live in Russia’s former capital and the city which inspired generations of Russian writers, a winter visit is warranted.
As Dostoevsky put it: “This is a city of half-crazy people…there are few places where you’ll find so many gloomy, harsh and strange influences on the soul of a man as in Saint Petersburg.”
So here you are: five surreal qualities of St. Petersburg in the winter that ultimately make the city a much more fascinating place to visit.
1.) It’s dark: Saint Petersburg is famous for its white nights in June, when the day’s last for 18 hours and the sun never sets. But in the winter the city is engulfed in darkness. The sun briefly makes an appearance at 10:00 a.m. before already setting at 4 p.m.
2.) It’s north: Saint Petersburg has a population of five million people. That makes it the size of Los Angeles, but located thousands of kilometers northward. It’s hard to contemplate that large of a city developing naturally in such a harsh climate. The only comparable cities are Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm, but these are villages compared to Saint Petersburg.
3.) It’s cold: Saint Petersburg is freezing. Temperatures dip to -30 degrees on certain days of the winter and hover around zero or below for the remainder. Saint Petersburg is also a windy city. Located next to the Baltic Sea, the city has a constant breeze blowing through it, which makes the already freezing temperatures even harder to bear.
4.) It’s empty: A city that’s so cold doesn’t exactly take toward leisurely walking. Most locals shut themselves inside during the winter and let the tourists do the walking. As a result, the city can often feel like a ghost town, with magnificent parks, streets and canals left empty.
5.) It’s European: What do you get when you build a city so far north that remains cold, dark and empty for most of the year? You get the strangest city in Europe and possibly the entire world. Built on a swamp in only 1703 at a time when most of Europe’s other great capitals had existed for centuries, Saint Petersburg served as a symbol by the Czars to prove to the rest of Europe that Russia was also European.
The Czars really did try hard. Saint Petersburg contains narrow Dutch style houses around picturesque canals reminiscent of the best of Amsterdam. The city has neoclassical buildings and squares with Greek and Roman style columns and temples replicating the beauties of Italy and Greece. There are enormous churches, ancient orthodox cathedrals, massive stone fortresses, ports and bridges all showcasing the city’s European heritage.
So why visit Saint Petersburg in the winter? Saint Petersburg offers a surreal travel experience that you do not get when visiting other cities in Europe. There is something hauntingly beautiful roaming around Saint Petersburg’s empty streets in the winter at nine in the morning with the moon still out and snow on the ground and the city covered in darkness. The atmosphere is gloomy but beautiful. European buildings tower over you and offer a testament to a former era when Russia was a leading European power and for centuries ruled over the biggest landmass on the globe. If anything, the cold and darkness of Saint Petersburg’s winter will make you appreciate the warmth of Russia more. You can only capture this feeling by visiting in the winter time.
