Czar Peter the Great claimed that he named the city after the apostle, but I doubt that. The name of the city itself changed several times from Saint Petersburg, then to Petrograd (1914), then Leningrad (1924) and then finally back to Saint Petersburg (1991). The city was founded in 1703 and is located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The location is so that between rivers and canals you can reach the Caspian Sea. It was built in the 1700s after most of the main European capitals so the design followed aspects of Amsterdam and Paris among the others. They built a large network of canals but with lots of flooding they decided to fill most of them in making roads. Some of the canals are still in use. Many of the houses have low doors so that the home could be accessed by boat. The city was severely damaged during World War II and there is even still reconstruction going on now. All of the buildings are painted with colors of various pastels with white trim that would make for a much more pleasant view against the grey sky. There are only 30 days of sun per year and we were fortunate to be there on one of them. The hermitage has three million started as a private collection of Catherine II. The name hermitage is derived from it being a collection for a hermit. If a person was to spend one minute on each piece it would take 9 years to see the whole museum. The Peter and Paul fortress in the middle of the river for ideal defensibility. At the heart of the fortress is the citadel founded by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century. Within the citadel many royals are entombed. With the Russian Orthodox Church there are no pews so the entire service is standing, hopefully this would lead to shorter meetings. We had a nice lunch with the soup course looking like sauerkraut in a beet broth. The main course of meat and potatoes was very tasty. We also saw the iconic onion shaped roofs of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood.
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