Beautiful Sunday in the Peter and Paul Fortress

The morning was sunny but windy, so I decided to take shelter from the wind in the narrow streets inside the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Peter and Paul Fortress is located on an island in the Neva delta, it occupies the island almost entirely. Only a narrow strip of beach remains free. Usually in summer locals and tourists sunbathe and just relax on this beach, but this year the beach is closed, repair works are going on. Repair work affected only the outer walls of the fortress, inside you can walk around as usual.

I entered the fortress through the Vasilyevsky Gate. The gate is so called because it faces the neighbouring Vasilievsky Island. When you pass through the gate you can appreciate the thickness of the walls of the fortress. Where do these doors lead to? It is not known, the doors are tightly closed. Only the museum staff could shed light on this mystery. Most of the Peter and Paul Fortress is a museum of the city's history.

If you turn right from Vasilyevsky Gate, you can see a striped gate that leads to one of the inner courtyards. This is the Trubetskoy Bastion, which houses one of the museum complexes. When the Peter and Paul Fortress lost its defensive importance, the Trubetskoy Bastion was used as a prison for state criminals. It was in this prison that the son of Emperor Peter the Great, who was arrested for participating in a state conspiracy, was held.

I keep walking and soon come to a small garden near the Fortress Commandant's House. There is a sundial here, which is usually very crowded with tourists. But this time there is for some reason almost no one here, and I take the rare opportunity to take a few photos with no foreign hands or feet. I get closer to tell the time and compare it with the time on my smartphone.

In sunny weather, the clock works properly. Just keep in mind that the clock shows the true astronomical solar time, it differs from modern daylight saving time by one hour. At the same time I read the recommendations for determining the time on a metal plate nearby. This metal plaque was installed at the same time as the clock in 2014, and in the past ten years the information on it has become outdated, this is due to experiments with daylight saving time and back.

Nearby is another city art object, the genre sculpture ‘Twelve Chairs’. It too looks like a sundial. A metal tree grows in the centre, and around it are chairs of bizarre shapes. But my time to walk around this garden alone is quickly running out, a group of tourists are approaching the garden from the direction of the Peter and Paul Cathedral. I walk around the streets of the Peter and Paul Fortress some more, trying to avoid the central square and the main avenue.

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Smartphone	Google Pixel 3a
Location	Saint Petersburg, Russia