Northwestern Russia Events

The regional calendar is dominated by the light — and by one festival that exists because of it.

Scarlet Sails — late June, Saint Petersburg

The city’s white nights celebration and its school-leavers’ festival, held on the brightest night of the year. It takes its name and its image from a 1920s novella in which a girl waits for a ship with scarlet sails to come for her, and the centrepiece is exactly that: a tall ship under red sails coming up the Neva in the middle of the night, past crowds packed along the granite embankments, with fireworks and a pyrotechnic display fired from the water and the Peter and Paul fortress. It draws well over a million people, the bridges and the city centre close, and the whole thing runs until dawn — which in late June is not much of an achievement, as it never gets properly dark. It began in 1968, was dropped for two decades and revived in 2005, and remains a genuinely local occasion despite the scale.

White nights — late May to mid-July

Not a single event but a season: the Mariinsky runs a festival, museums extend hours, and the raising of the Neva bridges around one in the morning becomes a nightly public spectacle.

Maslenitsa — February or March

The week before Lent, marked with blini, fairs and the burning of a straw effigy of winter.

Siege commemorations — 27 January and 8 September

The lifting of the blockade and its beginning are both marked in Saint Petersburg, with ceremonies at the Piskaryovskoye memorial cemetery where several hundred thousand of the dead are buried in mass graves. These are quiet, serious civic occasions.

Kizhi and Karelian folk festivals — summer

Wooden architecture, bell-ringing and folk singing on the island and around Lake Onega.