St. Petersburg.
Every city has something to be proud of. We believe however that St. Petersburg is truly an original city. Other cities may be summarized by a few words, such as ‘city of canals’, or ‘city of lights’. But St. Petersburg has been described in more ways than any other city. ‘Window of the West’, ‘Palmira’ or ‘Venice of the North’ (as early as 1738 there were already more than 40 bridges over the city’s rivers and canals), ‘Peter’s creation’, ‘universal city’, ‘city of Dostoevsky’, ‘cradle of revolution’, ‘hero city’ and ‘city of white nights’.
St. Petersburg was a planned city, a city artificially imposed by man on nature in an inhospitable and scarcely populated corner of the Empire. In 1703, when Tsar Peter 1 captured the Swedish fortress of Nienshants on the Neva, the place where St. Petersburg stands today was a forested and swampy area at the mouth of the Neva river. Here lived a few Finnish and Russian tribes, practicing trapping and fishing. This place became the capital of the Russian Empire, a huge centre of the Baltic Sea, one just as important to Northern Europe as the Mediterranean was for the Romans.
The population of St. Petersburg was multinational from the very start. Unlike any other Russian city St. Petersburg always had a large number of foreigners living in it: Germans, Jews, Greeks, Finns, Poles and Swedes, among many others. Traditionally, St. Petersburg was a city of great religious toleration. On Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main street, there are Lutheran, Catholic and Armenian churches. St. Petersburg also had a synagogue, a splendid mosque, and Europe’s largest Buddhist temple.
Rome, centre of European Christian civilization, was the City of Saint Peter. Peter the Great named his city after the same saint. He thus announced Russia’s new cultural and historic mission in Europe and the world.

b) Письменно ответьте на вопросы к тексту:
1. How many bridges were there in St. Petersburg by 1738?
2. What was the place of the Empire in 1703 where St. Petersburg stands today?
3. What tribes lived here?
4. What can you say about the population of St. Petersburg?
5. What did Peter the Great name his city after?