Bridging the seasons
Dec 27, 2019
3 minutes
IT was one of the world’s more arcane ceremonies. I left my hotel just after midnight to witness a bridge opening. That is, the raising of a bridge’s bascules, not a ribbon-snipping ceremony.
It was not even as if the event was rare—it happens almost every night in summer. But this was St Petersburg, where bridges are no mere river crossings, they are valves to the city’s soul. How else to account for the crowd of 300, nearly all Russians, who had already gathered beside the river Neva
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