Peter and Paul Fortress

The Peter and Paul Fortress is the oldest architectural and historical monument in Saint Petersburg, located on Hare Island in the delta of the Neva River. It is from its founding on 16 (27) May 1703, by order of Peter the Great, that the city's founding date is traditionally reckoned. The fortress was built as a defensive structure to protect the newly won lands along the Neva from the Swedes: the site was chosen for the island's small size and the ability to command the river's navigable channel under fire. The earthen ramparts were originally built according to the bastion system of the French engineer Vauban, and from 1706 they began to be replaced with stone fortifications under the direction of the architect Domenico Trezzini. In the 1780s the walls and bastions facing the Neva were faced with granite.

At the centre of the fortress, to Trezzini's design, the Peter and Paul Cathedral was built, its bell tower crowned with a gilded spire bearing the figure of an angel; the cathedral became the burial place of the Russian imperial house — almost all Russian emperors from Peter I to Alexander III are buried here. Despite its defensive purpose, the fortress never once took part in military action: from its earliest decades it was used as a political prison. Over the years its casemates held Tsarevich Alexei, the Decembrists, the writers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, members of the "People's Will" movement — including Lenin's elder brother Alexander Ulyanov — and, after the revolution, victims of the Red Terror.

Since 1873 a signal cannon has been fired every day at noon from the Naryshkin Bastion — a tradition interrupted only for two decades of the 20th century. The fortress grounds also house the Boat House, where Peter the Great's first boat was kept, the Mint building, which has operated since the 18th century, and the Museum of Cosmonautics and Rocket Technology. The fortress has been a museum since 1924, and since 1993 a historical and cultural museum-reserve; together with the historic centre of Saint Petersburg, it is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The fortress's silhouette, with the cathedral's spire, is one of the principal symbols of the city's skyline.