Sankt Peterburg Map

• The first and fairly rich chapter of the history of the local toponymy is the story of the own name of the city itself. The name day of Peter I falls on June, 29 when the Russian Orthodox Church observes the memory of Saint Apostles Peter and Paul. The consecration of the small wooden church in their names (its construction began simultaneously with the citadel) made them the heavenly patrons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, while St. Peter at the same time became the eponym of the whole city.

• Explanation of "Sankt-" by the appreciation of Dutch culture by Peter the Great is one of common misconceptions: "Saint-" in Dutch is "Sint". The sample which czar Peter followed sounds in the names of another European cities: Sankt Goar in Germany, Sankt Michael in Austria and some others, of which the closest to Sankt Petersburg was Sankt Michel in rival Swedish Empire (now Mikkeli in Finland). "Sankt-" in these toponyms is merely a Germanized form of Latin: Sanctus.

• A 14-15-letter long name, composed of the three roots proved too cumbersome, and a lot of shortened versions appeared in habitual use. The first General Governor of the city Menshikov is maybe also the author of the first nickname of Petersburg which he called Петри (Petri). It took some years until the known Russian spelling of this name finally settled. In 1740s Mikhail Lomonosov uses a derivative of Greek: Πετροπόλης (Petropolis, Петрополис) in a russified form Petropol’ (Петрополь). A combo Piterpol (Питерпол) also appears at this time. Anyway, eventually the usage of prefix "Sankt-" ceased except for the formal official documents, where a 3-letter abbreviation "СПб" (SPb) was very widely used as well.

• In the 1830s Alexander Pushkin translated the 'foreign' city name of 'Saint Petersburg' to the more Russian Petrograd in one of his poems. However, it was only on 31 1914, after the war with Germany had began, did tzar Nicholas II rename the capital to Petrograd. Since the prefix 'Saint' was omitted, this act also changed the eponym and the 'patron' of the city, from Apostle Peter to Peter the Great, its founder.

• After the October Revolution, and until the city was renamed Leningrad in January 1924, the name Красный Петроград (Red Petrograd) was often used in newspapers and other prints.

• In the referendum on reversing the renaming of Leningrad on June 12, 1991, renaming it to Petrograd was not an option. Because of this only 54.86% of the voters (with a turnout of 65%) supported "St.Petersburg". This change officially took effect on September 6, 1991. Meanwhile the oblast which administrative center is also in Petersburg is still named Leningradskaya.

• Having passed the role of capital to Petersburg, Moscow has never succumbed the title of 'capital', being called "pervoprestolnaya" ("first-throned") for 200 years. A mirroring name for Petersburg in this connotation, the "Northern Capital", is reintroduced today in the sense that several federal institutions were moved from Moscow to Petersburg recently. Solemn descriptive names like "the city of three revolutions" and "the cradle of the October revolution" used in Soviet era reminded the pivot events of national history which occurred here. For their part, poetic names of the city, like the "Venice of the North" and the "Northern Palmyra" emphasize town-planning and architectural features contrasting these parallels to the northern location of this megalopolis. Petropolis is a translation of a city name to Greek, and is also a kind of descriptive name: Πέτρ~ is a Greek root for "stone", so the "city from stone" emphasizes the material which had been forcibly made obligatory for construction from the very first years of the city.

• After 1991 a wave of re-namings started within the city. It affected not only toponyms of the Soviet era, but in some cases their pre-revolutionary ones (in 1993 Gogol Street which bore the name of Nikolai Gogol since 1902, was renamed to Malaya Morskaya).

• Today, the city is the final destination of a web of intercity and suburban railways, served by five different railway terminals (Baltiysky, Finlyandsky, Ladozhsky, Moskovsky, and Vitebsky), as well as dozens of non-terminal railway stations within the federal subject. Saint Petersburg has international railway connections to Helsinki, Finland, Berlin, Germany, and all former republics of the USSR. The Helsinki railway was built in 1870, 443 km (275 mi), commutes three times a day, in a journey lasting about three and a half hours with the new Allegro train.

• The Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway opened in 1851, 651 km (405 mi); the commute to Moscow now requires from three and a half to nine hours.

• In 2009 Russian Railways launched a high speed service on the Moscow-Saint Petersburg route. The new train, known as Sapsan, is a deriative of the popular Siemens Velaro train; various versions of which are already in service in a number of European countries. It set records for the fastest train in Russia on May 2, 2009, travelling at 281 km/h and on May 7, 2009, travelling at 290 km/h (180 mph).

• Since December 12, 2010 Karelian Trains, a joint venture between Russian Railways and VR (Finnish Railways), has been running Alstom Pendolino operated high-speed services between Saint Petersburg's Finlyandsky and Helsinki's Central railway stations. These services are branded as 'Allegro' trains.

• Saint Petersburg has significant historical and cultural heritage and is thus a highly attractive tourist destination.

• The 18-19 century architectural ensemble of the city and its environs is preserved in virtually unchanged form. For various reasons (including large-scale destruction during World War II and construction of modern buildings during the postwar period in the largest historical centers of Europe), Saint Petersburg has now become a unique nature reserve of European architectural styles of the past three centuries. Saint Petersburg's loss of capital city status, significantly helped the city in retaining many pre-revolutionary buildings, as modern architectural 'prestige projects' tended to be built in Moscow; this largely prevented the rise of mid to late of 20th century architecture in the city and helped maintain the architectural appearance of the historic center.

• Saint Petersburg is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as an area with 36 historical architectural complexes, and around 4000 outstanding individual monuments of architecture, history and culture. New tourist programs and sightseeing tours have been developed for those wishing to see Saint Petersburg's cultural heritage.

• The city has 221 museums, 2000 libraries, more than 80 theaters, 100 concert organizations, 45 galleries and exhibition halls, 62 cinemas, and around 80 other cultural establishments. Every year the city hosts around 100 festivals and various competitions of art and culture, including more than 50 international ones. Despite the economic instability of the 90s not a single major theatre or museum has been closed in Saint Petersburg; on the contrary many new ones have opened, for example, a private museum of puppets (opened in 1999) is the third museum of its kind in Russia, where collections of more than 2000 dolls are presented, including 'The multinational Saint Petersburg' and 'Pushkin's Petersburg'. The museum world of Saint Petersburg is incredibly diverse. The city is not only home to the world-famous Hermitage Museum and The Russian State Museum with its rich collection of Russian art, but also the palaces of Saint Petersburg and its suburbs, so-called small town museums and others like the museum of famous Russian writer F. M. Dostoevsky; Museum of Musical Instruments, the museum of decorative arts and the museum of professional orientation.

• The musical life of Saint Petersburg is rich and diverse, with the city now playing host to a number of annual carnivals.

• Ballet performances occupy a special place in the cultural life of Saint Petersburg. The Petersburg School of Ballet is deservedly named as one of the best in the world. Traditions of the Russian classical school have been passed down from generation to generation amongst outstanding educators. The art of famous and prominent Saint Petersburg dancers like Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov was, and is, admired throughout the world. Contemporary Petersburg ballet is made up not only of traditional Russian classical school, but also ballets by those like Boris Eifman's, who expanded the scope of strict classical Russian ballet to almost unimaginable limits. Remaining faithful to the classical basis (he was a choreographer in Vaganova Academy of Dance), he combined classical ballet with the avant-garde style, and them, in turn, with acrobatics, rhythmic gymnastics, dramatic expressiveness, cinema, color, light, and finally with spoken word.

• With a packed cultural program and a large number of world heritage sites, as well as a developing tourist infrastructure, Saint Petersburg has started to enter into the number of the world's leading centers of culture and tourism.

• Russia used to have a high level of crime that increased significantly after the October revolution. Having reduced in subsequent years, especially when the city was besieged during the war (1941–1944), it was followed by a relatively short crime wave in the second half of 1940s which in its turn subsided at the beginning of the 1950s. A sharp spike in the crime level occurred at the end of the 1980s – beginning of the 1990s as a result of Perestroika-time turmoils (redistribution of property, privatization, decline of living standards, decrease of the effectiveness of militia etc.) By that time the city had fallen under the control of a number of organized criminal groups such as Tambov Gang, Malyshev Gang, Kazan Gang and ethnic criminal groups, engaged in racket, extortion, paying off local government, and violent clashes with each other.

• After the assassinations of City Property Committee Chairman and vice-Governor Mikhail Manevich(1997), State Duma deputy Galina Starovoytova (1998), acting City Legislature Speaker Viktor Novosyolov (1999) and a number of prominent businesspeople, Saint Petersburg was dubbed Capital of Crime in the Russian press. There were a number of movies filmed in Saint Petersburg about the life of crime; Banditskiy Peterburg: Advocat, Brother (1997) reinforcing its image as the Crime Capital of Russia.

• It is hard to assess the state of affairs by 2011, since a page of an official portal of the Government of St. Petersburg saying about the decrease in juvenile crime in 2004–2005 has not been updated since that time. Statements that by 2010 the number of crimes against tourists has decreased by one third compared to 2007 provide neither exact figures nor the structure of these crimes. Meanwhile Saint Petersburg experiences significant levels of street crime and bribery. In addition, in recent years there has been a notable increase in racially motivated violence, in particular towards foreign students. One of notable white supremacist groups Belaya Energia (White Energy, originally comes from White Power), has reportedly been one of the gangs involved in murdering foreign university students.