Crimson skies of a marshland miracle

Peter the Great patterned the city after Amsterdam, and even though St Petersburg is newer than New York by almost 100 years, in some places it feels a thousand years old — a few buildings seem to be a cross between Roman ruins and German palaces. The building walls, usually between three and four feet thick, host basement cafés and restaurants where you can’t get a mobile phone signal. The walls are moist, and smell like rivers, because the city was built on marshland.

In the centre of the city, when I lived in St Petersburg, I often walked through the intricate urban design and strange history. The cathedral on Canal Griboyedova, which looks like a pleated cake, mostly in blue and gold, is named Spas na Krovi, the Saviour on Spilled Blood. Here Alexander II, a great reformer who abolished serfdom, was killed by a team of anarchist assassins, a script pretty closely followed later on by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.

One day, almost immediately after arriving in the city in 2006, I strolled into the Summer Garden and looked at the low palaces across the Fontanka River. According to a guide who spoke through a megaphone with a crackling sound from a tourist boat, in one of the palaces anybody caught practicing cannibalism during the Great Siege was hanged. A million froze and starved to death, and only about a hundred cases of cannibalism were recorded.