🚶 Smolenka Embankment

A quiet river on Vasilyevsky Island with green banks, benches and a view of the cemetery groves.

Before Petersburg was founded the river was called Yamakkayoki, in the 18th century Mayakusha, then the Black and the Glukhaya River.
The river received the name Smolenka in 1864 — after the Smolensky Cemetery and to avoid confusion with another Chernaya River.
In the 1960s–1970s a new mouth was dug for the river: it used to flow into the Malaya Neva, and now flows straight into the Gulf of Finland.
From 1805, on 1 August, the clergy of the cemetery church walked to the river in a procession to bless the water.

Part of these routes