BEWITCHED BY ST PETERSBURG

In my view,

The Telegraph’s readers have shown great taste in choosing St Petersburg as their favourite European city, ahead of Venice and Seville. I am sure that they are absolutely right, but it’s still surprising.

As fabulous and golden as the city appears on a day of northern sunlight, St Petersburg is a place for people who aren’t afraid of a bit of history and darkness. The Russian historian Nikolay Karamzin said it was “built on tears and corpses” – a quotation that’s unlikely to feature in travel brochures. And yet, St Petersburg is utterly bewitching and draws the visitor back time and again.

My first visit to St Petersburg was on a school trip in 1983, when the city was called Leningrad. I remember canals, bad food and interminable excursions in tour buses. In spite of those underwhelming first impressions, I’ve been back many times since and my initial indifference has turned into a fascination verging on obsession.

In fact, obsession is deeply entwined with the history of St Petersburg. The idea for the city was Peter the Great’s. He built it in spite of its huge cost in money and lives. It’s suffered floods, sieges, revolution and world wars.

One constant about St Petersburg is its beauty: pastelcoloured stucco palaces, the gilded spire of the Admiralty, and the canals that infiltrate the city reflecting the light of seemingly endless summer evenings. St Petersburg is also home to my favourite Russian building, the unforgettably named Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood (below). This was built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881.

St Petersburg holds both one of the world’s greatest art museums – the Hermitage – and one of its weirdest: Peter the Great’s Kunstkamera. This collection includes an exhibition of medical oddities.

I think part of the magic of St Petersburg is that the sense that it’s still evolving. Through the Nineties it was lawless and chaotic. Now the city where the October

Revolution began is an active player in the world’s ongoing geopolitical dramas. A blocky office building on Savushkina

Street in the city’s outskirts houses the so-called troll farm from where Russian intelligence is thought to have meddled with the US elections.

I’ve always thought of St Petersburg as somewhere that has a distinct and complex appeal. It’s heartening that Telegraph readers have kept visiting, and discovered its delights.