Chapter 2.

The first morning of September was foggy. When I woke up and looked out of my window at 6 a.m., trees and nearby buildings were hidden in clouds, in thick grey mist, still and liveless. And while the first evening of Semtember was dying outside, night was coming closer, and the black sky was starting to drop tears down to Earth. That first rain of September suddenly reminded me when and how I started to live in St. Petersburg.

I was born here, actually, but the day before my first birthday my family arrived to the small, really small town in Murmansk region, on Kolsky Peninsula, where we all spent next sixteen years. Of course, every now and then, sometimes even every year, we got back to St. Petersburg, for the summer vacation and sometimes in the middle of winter or fall, but I've always felt like a guest there. I have never thought I am going to live there, so when I finally moved here for good, I didn't quite realized that this city was going to be my home. In the beginning I was too busy getting ready for the exams at the university, after that I was too busy trying to understand what I was going the do with the last weeks of summer... And suddenly it happened. First day of September. First day of another life. My parents were still in our small town Gadzhiyevo, I was here with my grandmother and relatives, but for the first time in my life I was alone. Alone with my new life. That was amazing. Scary, unexpected, surprizing, even painful, but amazing. That was the first day of September, 1999.

I think it's because of that for me this city stands for fall. And I like fall. I like it because it's a season when Summer goes soft and quiet, when Persephone looks at me with smile, shuts the door behind summer's back, locking all the heat and green out, and turns her face to me, and I see her bright eyes with orange flame deep inside, I see her red locks and fiery dress. She is strong and proud, and neither rain nor leaden dome of everlasting clouds above my head can make me feel blue. She is too beautiful.

But not the city. I can't explain it properly, but the city is too gloomy, too wet, too dirty under this beautiflul garment of fall. I am a man of the North, I haven't really seen what is fall like in a big city, because where I come from there are only two seasons, winter and the other one, so I just wasn't prepared for this. So, this mixture consisting of recency and inhospitality and drearyness in time transformed into something vague, something I couldn't define. Only a couple of years ago I realized what is was.

The city reminded me of a swamp.

Long ago I've seen a real swamp. That swamp was vast and foggy, but, unlike the swamps most people know of, it was mute. No frogs, no bubbling, no cues of crickets or something, only silence and smoky white fog all around me, so thick that words and cries would've drowned in it. That swamp wasn't scary, I would've said it just wasn't glad to see me, neither as a guest, nor as a victim. It wasn't glad to see me, but at the same time it had no intention to make me go away. I felt like I was a kind of evil necessity, and it was not a nice feeling.

And the city was very much like that swamp from my childhood. When my life here had started, St Petersburg was cold, foggy, wet and not happy about me being here at all. And very soon this became  mutual.

Chapter 1.

If you really want to know someone, you have to be aware not only of his or her present days, you need to have some information from the days of old. If I want to get to know the city I live in, it's not enough to see it every day and to watch its everyday life, there are facts from its past I have to take into account. So I looked back, where and when (and why) St. Petersburg began. 

The very foundation of the city is not just a historical fact, but also a myth, a legend, where truth is no longer obvious. One of those legends says that the City of St. Peter could not be at the spot where it was founded. Earth was too swampy, and ways of building which were actual those day were too weak to make the idea of St. Petersburg something more than just and idea. But the city was built, and very soon people started to say that it was a miracle, that it was built in heaven and then lowered down to Earth. Maybe it because of that I've always been quite indifferent about the city in general: I live in a city that should have never existed in the first place. 

Before there was the city, the Emperor of Russia Peter the Great erected a fortress which is still there, Peter and Paul Fortress. After the fortress there was a shipyard, and only then the city had started to grow around it. Unlike many other fortifications in the world, this one has never looked aggressive, not from my point of view, anyway. Maybe this is one of the reasons I've never had any special feelings about St. Petersburg: it is not what it have to be. And it's really not. It's something more that just a city, more than just a fortress. Long ago St. Petersburg had changed the entire country, not just from the outside, but from the inside, too.

Fourth Rome — that's what Peter the Great intended to build on shores of Neva. The heart of the Empire. The cultural, economical, military and governmental center of the land. Fourth Rome, the one that could not be, the one that should not be, for Philotheus of Pskov had once said: "Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth". Peter the Great had great ambitions and great vision, regardless the monk's word, maybe even to spite his proclamations, and he succeeded perfectly. St. Petersburg become the capital of Russian Empire in 1712 and quit this job only in 1918, so for more than 200 years the city was the core of the country. Quite a term, one must admit, considering the fact that it was founded in 1703, and I can actually see or at least feel the consequences. There's a popular joke in my city: only in St. Petersburg moving to Moscow isn't a step forward, but a hopeless descent. On some level we still feel ourselves like metropolitans, like people from the capital (the real capital, some might say). It really annoys me, in myself and in the others.

It's a great city. It's a beautiful city. I bugs me that I can't see what people see in it. I know people who really love it, deeply and sincerely. I know people who hate it, - deeply and sincerely. But I feel no excitement about it at all. Nada. No love, no hate. But I want to find something in St. Petersburg that will make me feel about it, no matter how good or bad this feeling is going to be. Goal is set. The searching party has landed.

Prologue

There is a Russian movie, a romantic comedy titled "Piter FM". It is a story of a young architect who is getting ready to leave St. Petersburg and go to Germany, because they offered him a job there. So he has a few days to finish all that needs to be finished, and one must admit he has got a lot in his hands: his ex-girlfriend with whom he is still in love is going to get married and she still had some of her stuff in his apartment, his boss won't let him leave, and that's not all, but I won't retell a whole plot of this film here, I'll just say that besides being a romantic comedy this movie is also a movie about the city. The director and the screenwriter are in love with St. Petersburg, and so does the main character. They are fond of the city, they admire it, they breathe with its air, and you can feel it in every frame, in every shot, in every single second of the movie.

I was born in St. Petersburg. I had left it when I was one and returned here only when I was seventeen, so I've been here for more than thirteen years now, and I have to admit: I don't know this city. I don't speak with it, I don't understand it, and I don't even like it. But, at the same time, I envy those who has a real connection with St. Petersburg, or Piter, as we call it. So I decided to give it a shot and try to get closer to it. I want to get to know it. I want to ask it questions and hope to hear answers. I want to learn how to like it. This is why I start this blog, and I really think that this time we'll be able to be friends. Me and the city I live in.