Hermitage Bridge

The Hermitage Bridge spans the Winter Canal, connecting two parts of Admiralteysky Island in the very heart of the historic centre. It is the city's oldest stone crossing, and the view of it from Millionnaya Street has long become one of the familiar symbols of St Petersburg; today the bridge holds the status of a cultural heritage site of federal significance.

The name of the crossing changed along with the development of this corner of the city. In 1738 it was officially named Verkhny Naberezhny (Upper Embankment) Bridge, but this name never took root in everyday speech: townspeople called the crossing either Zimnedvortsovy or simply Palace Bridge, after its proximity to the imperial residence. The modern name, linked to the buildings of the Small and Old Hermitage, was fixed only in 1829. The first crossing on this site appeared in 1718–1720, immediately after the canal itself was dug: to a design by the Dutch master Harman van Boles, a wooden drawbridge on piles with a movable central span was built.

A permanent stone structure was built in 1763–1766, at the same time as the granite embankments of the Neva, and this bridge became the first stone bridge in the city's history. The vault was made of brick and limestone, the façade arches and the facing of the bank abutments were of granite, and solid granite parapets served as railings. In this form, with periodic repairs, the structure stood for almost a century and a half.

By 1933 an inspection had shown that the vault's masonry had fallen into a dangerous state: the joints had opened up, some of the stones had fallen out, and the inner surface had frozen to a depth of up to ten centimetres. A year later the decayed vault was replaced with a monolithic reinforced-concrete one, to a design by the engineer Alexander Saperstein and the architect Konstantin Dmitriev, while the bridge's appearance from the embankments was preserved almost unchanged. Around 1950 the architectural decoration of the approach ramps was finally restored.

Today the bridge is a single-span structure with an elliptical vault, 25 cm thick at the crown and 45 cm at the abutments; its length is 12.2 metres and its width 15.2 metres. It carries two traffic lanes and pavements paved with granite slabs, separated from the roadway by a kerb.

Besides its engineering history, the bridge also carries a literary legacy: in the finale of Tchaikovsky's opera "The Queen of Spades," the hopelessly lovesick Liza throws herself into the water from this very spot — a plot twist absent from Pushkin's original tale, which the composer borrowed from a newspaper report of a real tragedy in the late 1860s. Because of this, the crossing acquired the popular nickname "Liza's Little Bridge," under which tourists often go looking for it before they even learn its official name.