The pages of Arctic history have been opened for tourists
The Arctic affairs committee presented a new tourist route in the northern capital, dedicated to the historical cooperation between Pomorie and St. Petersburg. It has already been tested in practice — and the pioneers in the face of the participants of the tour were satisfied. The initiative is very unusual: it seems that the route is laid through the most significant sights of St. Petersburg, but in every object there is, whether visible or not, the hand of the northern sister city is displayed.
The ceremonial start of the new route was given by Sergey Nikolaev, representative of the St. Petersburg Committee for Arctic affairs, Alla Valuiskikh, Deputy head of the Arkhangelsk Region Representative Office in St. Petersburg, and Pavel Vyalykh, Chairman of the Pomorie community. This route became the third in a series of thematic regional Arctic excursions in St. Petersburg.
The starting point is the monument to Peter the Great in St. Petersburg, erected in front of the SampsonievskyCathedral. This monument is a copy of the original sculpture, opened in 1909 to mark the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava. A similar sculpture in honor of the last tsar and the first emperor of Russia is located in Arkhangelsk, on the embankment of the Northern Dvina.
There are many iconic historical sites of the Northern Capital on the route: Rumyantsevsky Garden, Strelka (an Arrow) of Vasilyevsky Island, the «Krasin» icebreaker museum, the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, the Mikhail Lomonosov Museum and many others. Each of these attractions is associated with famous historical figures born in the Arkhangelsk region.
“You can learn more details about these connections by following the new route,” said Sergey Nikolaev. — For example, the ensemble of the Arrow of Vasilyevsky Island was created by the sculptor and stonemason Samson Sukhanov, a native of Krasnoborye. And the famous magic granite balls on the Spit of Vasilievsky Island were created by the sculptor without a single device — just cutting off all the excess.”
The most informative stops for the participants of the tourists pilot route, were the legendary icebreaker Krasin, which defended Arkhangelsk during the Great Patriotic War, and the Lomonosov museum in The Kunstkamera — the only room that has survived to this day, where Lomonosov conducted scientific arguments with colleagues.
“The history of the creation of this project is quite interesting,” says Maria Voronina, a leading analyst at the Arkhangelsk Region representative office in St. Petersburg. — One talented person, Konstantin Sholmov, a former correspondent and editor of «Delovoy Peterburg», ex—head of the St. Petersburg bureau of RIA Novosti, as well as a guide, historian, traveler and an Archangel resident living in the northern capital, periodically develops various interesting routes. Not so long ago, he created an interesting route dedicated to Lomonosov for the residents of St. Petersburg, and we really liked it. We decided that it is absolutely necessary to conduct similar excursions for citizens — after all, according to statistics from the “Arkhangelskstat”, people most often leave their native Pomorie precisely for the sake of the Northern capital — these are thousands of people annually. The Arctic affairs committee supported our idea, it just said that we need to involve more famous natives of Russia, and not just Mikhail Vasilyevich. So we thought about it, gave the project a start—up, and everything went well. We wish the project great prospects, because it is always interesting: to revive historical ties, connect two historically rich regions, understand that in fact we have a lot in common, and each region of Russia influences each other — even if we don’t really notice it at first.”
The development of Arctic excursion routes is taking place within the framework of the departmental project “Creation of a modern complex of competitive Arctic tourism products with the participation of St. Petersburg and the regions of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation”, initiated by the Committee for Arctic Affairs of St. Petersburg in 2020. Its implementation is carried out with the participation of the Association “Russian All-Terrain Society”.
The final goal of the project is to promote St. Petersburg as the starting point of Arctic tourist routes and increase the flow of tourists to the regions of the Arctic zone.