18 August] 1914, after the war with Germany had begun, that Tsar Nicholas II renamed the city Petrograd in order to expunge the German words Sankt and Burg.

[34][35] At the end of the 17th century, Peter the Great, who was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, wanted Russia to gain a seaport to trade with the rest of Europe.

16 May] 1703,[38] closer to the estuary (5 km (3 mi) inland from the gulf), on Zayachy (Hare) Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city.

[42] The style of Petrine Baroque, developed by Trezzini and other architects and exemplified by such buildings as the Menshikov Palace, Kunstkamera, Peter and Paul Cathedral, Twelve Collegia, became prominent in the city architecture of the early 18th century.

Many monuments commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleonic France in the Patriotic War of 1812, including the Alexander Column by Montferrand, erected in 1834, and the Narva Triumphal Arch.

The names of Saints Peter and Paul, bestowed upon the original city's citadel and its cathedral (from 1725 – a burial vault of Russian emperors) coincidentally were the names of the first two assassinated Russian emperors, Peter III (1762, supposedly killed in a conspiracy led by his wife, Catherine the Great) and Paul I (1801, Nikolay Alexandrovich Zubov and other conspirators who brought to power Alexander I, the son of their victim).

In March 1917, during the February Revolution Nicholas II abdicated for himself and on behalf of his son, ending the Russian monarchy and over three hundred years of Romanov dynastic rule.

It was a product of rivalry between Stalin's potential successors where one side was represented by the leaders of the city Communist Party organization – the second most significant one in the country after Moscow.

[59] In 1995, a northern section of the Kirovsko-Vyborgskaya Line of the Saint Petersburg Metro was cut off by underground flooding, creating a major obstacle to the city development for almost ten years.

Floods in Saint Petersburg are triggered by a long wave in the Baltic Sea, caused by meteorological conditions, winds and shallowness of the Neva Bay.

Matviyenko stood for elections as member of the Regional Council of Saint Petersburg and won comprehensively with allegations of rigging and ballot stuffing by the opposition.

Among the youngest is Russian Standard Vodka introduced in Moscow in 1998, which opened in 2006 a new $60 million distillery in Petersburg (an area of 30,000 m2 (320,000 sq ft), production rate of 22,500 bottles per hour).

The southern coast of Vasilyevsky Island along the Bolshaya Neva features some of the city's oldest buildings, dating from the 18th century, including the Kunstkamera, Twelve Collegia, Menshikov Palace and Imperial Academy of Arts.

Some other residences nearby and making part of the world heritage site, including a castle and park in Gatchina, actually belong to Leningrad Oblast rather than Saint Petersburg.

The most common trees grown in the parks are the English oak, Norway maple, green ash, silver birch, Siberian Larch, blue spruce, crack willow, limes, and poplars.

In 2008, the World Monuments Fund included the Saint Petersburg historic skyline on the watch list of the 100 most endangered sites due to the expected construction, which threatened to alter it drastically.

Unlike the previous unbuilt project, it was not seen by UNESCO as a potential threat to the city's cultural heritage due to its remote location from the historic centre.

For various reasons (including large-scale destruction during World War II and construction of modern buildings during the postwar period in the largest historical centres of Europe), Saint Petersburg has become a unique reserve of European architectural styles of the past three centuries.

The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office advises against travelling to Russia, including Saint Petersburg, noting there have been reports of fires and explosions in areas close to the city.

The school alumni have included such notable composers as Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Artur Kapp, Rudolf Tobias and Dmitri Shostakovich, who taught at the conservatory during the 1960s, bringing it additional fame.

It was premiered in Samara in March 1942; a few months later, it received its first performance in the besieged Leningrad at the Bolshoy Philharmonic Hall under the baton of conductor Karl Eliasberg.

Today's Saint Petersburg boasts many notable musicians of various genres, from popular Leningrad's Sergei Shnurov, Tequilajazzz, Splean, and Korol i Shut, to rock veterans Yuri Shevchuk, Vyacheslav Butusov, and Mikhail Boyarsky.

In the early 2000s the city saw a wave of popularity of metalcore, rapcore, and emocore, and there are bands such as Amatory, Kirpichi, Psychea, Stigmata, Grenouer and Animal Jazz.

The effect of life in Saint Petersburg on the plight of the poor clerk in a society obsessed with hierarchy and status also became an important theme for authors such as Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky.

Twentieth-century writers from Saint Petersburg, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, Andrey Bely and Yevgeny Zamyatin, along with his apprentices, The Serapion Brothers, created entirely new styles in literature and contributed new insights to the understanding of society through their experience in this city.

The first foreign feature movie filmed entirely in Saint Petersburg was the 1997 production of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, starring Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean and made by an international team of British, American, French and Russian filmmakers.

Saint Petersburg has an extensive city-funded network of public transport (buses, trams, trolleybuses [ru]) and several hundred routes served by marshrutkas.

Saint Petersburg Metro underground rapid transit system was opened in 1955; it now has 5 lines with 72 stations, connecting all five railway terminals, and carrying 2.3 million passengers daily.

The city is a node of the international European routes E18 towards Helsinki, E20 towards Tallinn, E95 towards Pskov, Kyiv and Odesa and E105 towards Petrozavodsk, Murmansk and Kirkenes (north) and towards Moscow and Kharkiv (south).

[194] Shortly after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gdańsk, Warsaw, Aarhus, Melbourne, Kotka, Turku, Riga and Tallinn terminated or suspended the cooperation, affiliation or sister city relationship with Saint Petersburg.