Sennaya Square
Historic marketplace square once notorious for slums, public floggings and cholera riots, now a busy transit hub.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Sennaya Square in Saint Petersburg opens with a scene from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a man dropping to kiss the ground as a crowd jeers, and traces it back to the real square the writer knew as the roughest patch of the city. You'll hear how an eighteenth-century hay and cattle market grew into a bazaar of peddlers, thieves and public floggings, and how cholera riots broke out here in 1831. A blue-domed church raised by merchants in the 1750s once watched over it all. Listen while standing at the square's center, where the crowd in Dostoevsky's scene would have gathered.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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