Znayu mestoI know a place
RUENESTR中文عربيفارسی
Русский English Español Türkçe 中文 العربية فارسی

Walking routes in Saint Petersburg

    🚶 Routes 📍 Places
    Where do you start
    Start typing an address, metro station or place in the search box above — or tap the map where you will start
    How much walking
    Interests
    Child's age pick one or more
    Food we'll pick places along the way
      ← All routes

      The General Staff, the Sphinxes and the Academy of Arts

      ⏱ 1 h🚶 3 km🍽 1📍 3 stops
      🚶 Moderate — 3–7 km

      The arc of the General Staff on Palace Square, a crossing of the Neva to the Egyptian sphinxes and the Academy of Arts, and a Georgian lunch at the end.

      🎨 Art✨ New places⏱ An hour or so
      🗺 Open in Yandex Maps
      1. 1
        🖼 General Staff Building (Hermitage)
        Дворцовая пл., 6–8
        🎟 ticket · included in the Hermitage single ticket
        Rossi's semicircular building with an arch on Palace Square; its east wing holds Hermitage exhibition halls under glass roofs.
        The General Staff Arch; the Impressionists on the 4th floor are separate and take another 1.5–2 hours.
        📖 More about the placeCollapse
        General Staff Building (Hermitage)
        © Wolfgang Moroder · CC BY-SA 3.0
        General Staff Building (Hermitage)
        © Alexey Komarov · CC BY 3.0
        General Staff Building (Hermitage)
        © Florstein · CC BY-SA 4.0
        • The building was built in 1819–1829 to a design by Carlo Rossi; until 1917 it housed the Army General Staff, the Foreign Ministry and the Finance Ministry.
        • The arch is crowned by Victory in a chariot drawn by six horses — the work of the sculptors Stepan Pimenov and Vasily Demut-Malinovsky.
        • To lighten the chariot, the figures were hammered out of copper over a cast-iron frame — making the sculptural group five times lighter.
        • On 30 August 1918 the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky, was killed in the entrance of the east building.
        • The east wing was transferred to the Hermitage in 1999, and its full reconstruction was finished in 2013.
        • The wing fully opened on 28 June 2014 with the Manifesta 10 biennial — Matisse's "Dance" and "Music" were moved here at the same time.
      2. 🚶 on foot
      3. 2
        🏛 Sphinxes by the Academy of Arts
        Университетская наб., 17
        A pair of granite Egyptian sphinxes on the steps down to the Neva by the Academy of Arts.
        The Academy of Arts
        📖 More about the placeCollapse
        Sphinxes by the Academy of Arts
        © Alex Fedorov (Florstein) · CC BY-SA 4.0
        Sphinxes by the Academy of Arts
        © GAlexandrova · CC BY-SA 4.0
        • The sphinxes were made under the pharaoh Amenhotep III for his mortuary temple in Thebes; in 1825 they were found by the antiquities hunter Giovanni d'Athanasi.
        • Each sphinx, of pink Aswan granite, weighs 23 tonnes and is 5.24 m long.
        • Buying them was proposed by the traveller Andrey Muravyov, who had seen a sphinx in Alexandria in 1830.
        • The sphinxes had already been sold to France, but the July Revolution wrecked the deal — and Russia bought them for 64,000 rubles.
        • While being loaded onto the ship ‘Buena Esperanza’, one sphinx fell and damaged the headcloth.
        • The sphinxes arrived in May 1832, but for two years stood in the courtyard of the Academy of Arts while Konstantin Thon finished the landing stage.
      4. 🚶 on foot
      5. 3
        🍽 Ketino
        9-я линия В.О., 20
        ▮▮▮▯▯
        Lunch
        🍴 A small family-run Georgian restaurant on the 9th Line, where guests are often greeted by the owner herself. What to order: Adjarian khachapuri, khinkali (Georgian dumplings), chkmeruli, salad with crispy aubergines.

      Find us on Telegram

      Partnerships and ideas

      ✉️ privet@znayumesto.ru

      Settings

      Data: © OpenStreetMap · DB-IP · weather — Open-Meteo
      The map did not load. You can still browse routes in the list and open them in Yandex Maps.

      We use cookies and Yandex Metrica to understand which routes are useful. Without your consent we keep only our own cookie-free statistics.