Tourism

The Bronze Horseman stands on a boulder of rapakivi granite hauled overland on a hand-built bronze ball race, and the Alexander Column is held on its pedestal by nothing but its own weight. Older accounts swap the two stones over.

Nevsky Prospekt is named after the Alexander Nevsky monastery at its eastern end, not after the river, and it runs four and a half kilometres from the Admiralty to the monastery gates.

Peter the Great founded this monastery in 1710 on the spot where Alexander Nevsky beat the Swedes on the Neva in 1240. It was the wrong spot, and the city's own encyclopaedia says so.

The Summer Garden's marble statues came indoors in 2009 and what stands there now is polymer concrete. Behind that small correction lies the most contested restoration carried out in this city in thirty years.

The Winter Palace was finished in 1762 for an empress who had already died, and the museum inside it began with a collection bought from a Berlin merchant whose first customer could not pay. Two Leonardos, two Raphaels and one Michelangelo sculpture, with three million objects behind them.

The charity-owned amusement park on Castle Hill: its season, the end of free entry, the hand-braked wooden coaster of 1951, and where the money goes.

The river town fifty kilometres east of Helsinki: the arson that destroyed the cathedral roof in 2006, the Diet of Porvoo, Runeberg, and why there is no train.

The Suomalainen brothers' church cut into granite in 1969: why the air-raid-shelter story is wrong, what the interior does, and the admission charge it introduced in 2017.

Havis Amanda and the May Day capping, the market hall that is actually on the square, the Suomenlinna ferry pier, and several years of groundworks.

Finnish Orthodox rather than Russian, built from the brick of a Baltic fortress an Anglo-French fleet destroyed in the Crimean War, and now charging admission.