A Baltic Sea tour, Gdansk and St. Petersburg (1)

“Barely stolen, already in Poland,' practically the Italian of the East.

The city of Gdynia has a significant cruise port in the Gdansk Bay. Together with Sopot and Gdansk, it forms a tri-city metropolitan region. It is the gateway to Scandinavia.

Sopot is the Riviera of the North. A spa town with beautiful sandy beaches, casinos, and luxury hotels, even the Sheraton has settled here.

Gdansk lay in ruins in 1945. Polish restorers, in a sense the builders of old structures, are now sought after worldwide. They have accomplished a small miracle here.

The houses are built rather narrow and tall, going deeper to simply avoid the window tax.

The crane gate from 1444 was operated with the help of prisoners through tread wheels, allowing ships to be loaded and unloaded.

In 1714, the current city of St. Petersburg was named Petrograd. Peter the Great was a fan of Amsterdam at the time and wanted to build the capital of the Russian Tsar Empire from the swampy area with canals in 1703.

In 1924, after Lenin's death, the city was named after him for a year, Leningrad. By 1925 it was already named Stalingrad. In 1941, Stalingrad was nearly starved for 4 years due to a siege by German troops. Until 1991 it was again called Leningrad, and only after the collapse of the Soviet Union was it renamed St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg has always been the gateway to the West.

The Catherine Palace of 1718 was a gift from Peter the First to his wife. The Amber Room was designed by Francesco Rastrelli in 1755 in the Catherine Palace and is now referred to as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

In October 1917, the cruiser Aurora signaled, with blank cartridges, the assault on the Winter Palace. The Russian October Revolution was initiated. Today, the Aurora is a naval and maritime museum.

The Isaac Cathedral is the fourth largest dome structure in the world. It was built in 1818 and is an Orthodox church. 400kg of gold were used in its construction.

The Rostral Columns were built in 1811 as lighthouses, adorned with captured ship bows and supplied with gas in 1957. Today they light up on holidays.

The Peter and Paul Fortress is the tallest fortress in St. Petersburg at 122m. It houses the graves of the Tsar family.

The Church of the Savior on Blood is an Orthodox church built after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. His son Alexander III commissioned the construction of the church as a monument in the old Russian style, exactly where his father was killed, in 1883.

The Hermitage was built by Catherine the II in 1764. She collected works by Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Rembrandt, and many more. The exhibition houses 3 million artifacts, making it one of the largest museums in the world.