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Across the Neva from the Winter Palace, on a small island, stands the Peter and Paul Fortress (Petropavlovskaya krepost), begun in 1703 and built to secure Russia's hold on the Neva delta. Forced labourers toiled from dawn to dusk to construct the fortress in just seven months. The fortress is permanently open - with no admission charge - but its cathedral and museums (covering the history of the city and Russian life up to 1917) keep regular visiting hours (Mon, Tues & Thurs-Sun 11am-6pm; closed last Tues of every month) and require tickets (around $10 for all the museums). The Peter and Paul Cathedral (Petropavlovskiy sobor) signals defiance from the heart of the fortress. The original wooden church commissioned by Peter on this site was replaced by a stone cathedral, completed by Trezzini in 1733, long after Peter had died. The facade of the cathedral looks Dutch, while the gilded spire was deliberately made higher than the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in the Kremlin - it remained the tallest structure (122m) in the city until the 1960s. Sited around the nave are the tombs of the Romanov monarchs from Peter the Great onwards - excluding Peter II, Ivan VI and Nicholas II. Nicholas and his family, whose bones were discovered in a mine shaft in the Urals in 1989, were finally buried in a chapel beside the cathedral in July 1998. The fortress was also used as a prison from 1718, when Peter the Great's son Aleksey was tortured to death here. The Prison Museum , however, fails to convey the full horror of conditions in tsarist times. The accessible cells are stark and gloomy, but far worse ones existed within the ramparts, below the level of the river, where the perpetual damp and cold made tuberculosis inevitable. Prisoners were never allowed to see each other and rarely glimpsed their jailers. Some were denied visitors and reading material for decades; many went mad and several committed suicide. In a somewhat surreal move, some of the bastions on the river side now house a contemporary art centre, Pro Arte, where some of the latest shows of video, performance and conceptual art are held, as well as packed lectures by some of the brightest Russian and European critics and philosophers.
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