To locals, it’s sometimes just Piter, named for a Saint Peter but inescapably linked to the Tsar Peter who had it conjured from a swamp. It’s an unnatural place. It didn’t grow up over centuries organically – because of a harbour, say, or a confluence of rivers. It was built swiftly by fiat, like Astana, Pyongyang or Dubai. Like them, it’s a boast in architectural form, and as with all boasting, there’s a nucleus of insecurity that it can’t conceal from everyone. In the works of Pushkin, and Gogol, and Dostoevsky, it’s the background to nightmares. Flood-prone, status-obsessed, somehow heartless; it isn’t good for a person’s soul. It’s a place where clerks are driven mad by endless light and unrequited love.

But on a warm day like today, the northern sky feels wide and hopeful. The spire of the Admiralty gleams like a raised sword, like the gold spike on a Buddhist stupa. I visited in 1990 when the whole place seemed to be crumbling. It’s good to see it cared for again. I love these smells: diesel fumes, sunshine on old stone, garlic sausage, brackish canals.

It was built to mark a fresh start for the country. Peter wanted Russia to be a European power and he commissioned foreign architects to tell that story in stone. These stucco palaces, the canals: they are his legacy.

But the place I want to take you to is this: see? It bursts out of the elegant cityscape like a crazed assertion of Russianness. It’s a luxurious reimagining of a peasant church. The multicoloured onion domes. The headscarved women lighting candles in the nave. The gold glinting on the iconostasis. The mosaics that cover every wall and reflect jewel-coloured light. The incense. At first glance, it seems like the oldest thing in the city, but it wasn’t finished until 1907.

It was consecrated as the Church of the Resurrection of Christ, but most people know it as Spas na Krovi: the Saviour on Blood. Here in the western apse, this canopy (rhodonite, jasper, serpentine) resembles a howdah; perched on four columns, it protects nothing more glamorous than a cobbled floor. Did you ask, why?

*

LET US UNDERTAKE AGAIN the trick of weaving the past from starlight. Set the dial for March 1881. As time spools back around us, indulge me by glancing at two snapshots. First, in 1990, that’s me, wandering around the city, now Leningrad, with a satchel of scavenged brochures. How vulnerable I look. I’m trying to compile information for a guidebook to the Soviet Union – a country that will cease to exist in just over a year. In the lobby of a hotel – beige carpets, marble, one-armed bandits – I fall into conversation with a track-suited tough called Ruslan and his girlfriend, Masha. Ruslan is friendly but somehow on edge. He quizzes me about my job, smokes, fidgets, puts his feet up on the coffee table. After a few minutes, we’re joined by another woman, Natasha, a blonde, who arrives in the elevator from an upper floor and an assignation with a Finnish tourist. She accepts a cigarette from Ruslan and shrugs in answer to Masha’s questioning raised eyebrows. Seated next to me, she smells strongly and incongruously of sweat.