Bridging The Seasons

Peter Hughes journeys to St Petersburg, the city of 400 bridges, to experience the annual midsummer White Nights festival

- Peter Hughes

IT was one of the world’s more arcane ceremonies. I left my hotel just after midnight to witness a bridge opening. That is the raising of a bridge’s bascules, not a ribbon-snipping ceremony.

It was not even as if the event was rare— it happens almost every night in summer. But this was St Petersburg, where bridges are no mere river crossings, they are valves to the city’s soul. How else to account for the crowd of 300, nearly all Russians, who had already gathered beside the river Neva by the time I arrived? So had a pop band, a troupe of fire-eaters, refreshment stalls and shoals of sightseeing craft. A boardwalk of boats, packed across the water, gunwale to gunwale, hovered in front of the bridge like fish held in a current.

At 1.15 am, the bridge opened. The pop group, suddenly silent, was superseded by Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 ringing out from speakers on the bridge, the edges of which were picked out in azure lights. A bell rang and the six-lane roadway seemed to buckle in the middle before arching up in two vast slabs of Tarmac. It was as if it had raised its arms in exultation. As well it might.

Palace Bridge, scene of the festivities, crosses the Neva from the Winter Palace, the former residence of the Tsars, to Vasilievsky Island. Opened in 1916, and the last bridge to have been built before the revolution, it’s one of nine that open every night in summer.