Winter Canal

The Winter Canal is one of St Petersburg's shortest artificial waterways, just 228 metres long, yet this small stretch between the Neva and the Moika brings together several of the city's landmark buildings: the Hermitage Theatre, the Old Hermitage, and the famous arched passage connecting them. This narrow canal beneath the walls of the Winter Palace has long been one of the most photographed corners of the historic centre.

The channel was dug in 1718–1719, with the contractor Vasily Ozerov overseeing the works, and as early as 1720 the retaining wall by Peter I's chambers was faced with stone — one of the city's first stone embankments. The canal's name changed several times: documents record variants such as "Old Palace Canal," "Zimnedomsky," and simply "Zimny" (Winter); from 1768 the right bank was even called Pochtovaya (Post Office) Street, after a nearby post house. The modern form of the name was fixed only by the early 19th century.

The ensemble around the canal took shape in the 1780s: on the site of Peter I's old Winter Palace, the architect Giacomo Quarenghi built the Classicist building of the Hermitage Theatre, while on the opposite bank the construction of the Old Hermitage, to a design by Yuri Felten, was completed at almost the same time. The two buildings were joined by a gallery at second-floor level, carried across the water on a massive arch — a passage long attributed by popular tradition to Quarenghi, though modern scholars agree it was Felten's work. In 1782–1784 the embankments were clad in granite and adorned with austere railings designed by the sculptor Ivan Dunker. Three bridges span the canal: the First Winter Bridge, the Hermitage Bridge — the city's oldest stone bridge — and the Second Winter Bridge, built already in Soviet times but deliberately styled to look old so as not to disturb the appearance of Pushkin-era St Petersburg.

The French writer Théophile Gautier, who visited Russia in 1859, compared the elegant arch over the canal to Venice's Bridge of Sighs and called St Petersburg the "Venice of the North." A legend has also survived, telling how envious rivals spread rumours about the unreliability of the new gallery, and how Empress Catherine II, to dispel any doubts, held a crowded festive reception on the passage — the structure passed the test with honour.

A special fame was brought to the canal by Pyotr Tchaikovsky's opera "The Queen of Spades": in the third act, the heroine Liza throws herself into the canal's waters straight from the Hermitage Bridge, although no such episode exists in Pushkin's original story. The plot twist was inspired by a real event — a note in an 1868 St Petersburg newspaper about the suicide of a certain Yulia Perova over an unhappy love affair, which the composer forwarded to his brother while working on the libretto. Since then the bridge has carried a second name — "Liza's Little Bridge." Today the Winter Canal remains a place where the city's engineering history, Classicist architecture and literary legend are all intertwined.