Peter the Great Central Naval Museum

This guide to the Peter the Great Central Naval Museum in Saint Petersburg starts with a teenage Peter digging through a barn near Moscow and finding a rotting wooden boat nobody wanted. You'll hear how a Dutch sailor named Franz Timmerman showed him it could sail against the wind, how another Dutchman, Karshten Brandt, repaired it, and how the boy taught himself to sail it on the water near Moscow. The guide follows what the future tsar later did with that one boat, ordering it sailed down the Neva every year with cannon fire and ceremony.