Kantemirovsky bridge - a landmark of St. Petersburg

2024 Author: Harold Hamphrey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:06

No wonder St. Petersburg is called the Venice of the North. The city occupies one of the first places in the world in terms of the amount of water, the presence and number of rivers (there are about 90 of them), channels and canals. Bridges in St. Petersburg allow you to move in the city, divided by the Neva, from one side to the other. Moreover, each of them is unique in its origin and structure.

One of them - the Kantemirovsky bridge across the Bolshaya Nevka - connects Medikov Avenue on Aptekarsky Island with Vyborgskaya Embankment. This is a very wide bridge with three lanes of traffic in each direction and, which is very significant, there are no traffic jams on it, because Medikov Avenue then goes into a series of winding streets of the Petrograd side, which are very inconvenient for heavy traffic. In addition to the width, the Kantemirovsky bridge is also long, more than three hundred meters long, therefore it is the second of all such structures in the city. The Kantemirovsky Bridge owes its name not so much to the adjacent street as to the Kantemirovka station liberated from the Germans, located in the Voronezh region.

The bridge as a permanent and drawbridge was erected in the 70s bythe project of the famous bridge builders B. B. Levin and B. N. Brudno, as well as the architect Govorkovsky A. V. And before that, back in the 18th century, the architect A. Whist created a pontoon bridge in this place, which was the fourth in a row in St. Petersburg. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was the first wooden and arched bridge built under the direction of A. A. Betancourt. Now the Kantemirovsky bridge consists of fifteen river spans, two spans over the embankments and two trestle parts with garages located there. At night, the bridge is illuminated by more than three hundred lamps, thus bringing magic to the life of the city. Powerful searchlights are fixed on the bridge supports and under it. Beautiful floor lamps are installed along the roadway, and the entrances to the bridge are decorated with granite blocks, on which the name of this masterpiece is engraved on metal plates. Admiring the beauty, you can forget that the Kantemirovsky bridge is a drawbridge, and if you don’t go to the right side in time, you can still walk along the embankment of the opposite side for a long time.

The bridges across the Neva and many other rivers are a kind of museum. This is a landmark of St. Petersburg, in addition to the Hermitage, other palaces and temples. After all, each next bridge is not similar to the previous one either in its architecture or in its history. That's it. Each bridge has its own story, just like the embankments. They in St. Petersburg also do not look alike. And what is very interesting, there are multi-colored bridges: Blue, Green, Red and Yellow. One of them, Blue, rather unusual, is a bridge-square, because it is very wide and is located next to St. Isaac's Square.

It is impossible to list all the bridges of St. Petersburg, because, including the suburbs of Peterhof, Pavlovskoye and others, there are more than eight hundred of them. But, having arrived in St. Petersburg, it is worth devoting a few days to excursions along the bridges of this wonderful city.