Peterhof is the work of a tsar who wanted his own Versailles on the Gulf of Finland. Peter the Great began the palace and its gardens in the early eighteenth century, and by the time of his daughter Elizabeth and later of Catherine the Great, the Great Cascade, with its gilded statues and its fountains, was one of the most extravagant waterworks in Europe. Behind the formal gardens, the Lugovoy, meaning the meadow park, is a larger, quieter landscape of open lawns, ponds, tree-lined paths and old oaks, a place where Petersburgers come to walk dogs and push prams on weekends.
The twentieth century was brutal here. Peterhof was occupied by German forces from 1941 to 1944, and the palace was burned, the statues carried off or smashed, and the park cut down. After the war, restorers rebuilt it piece by piece, and the central statue of the Great Cascade, Samson wrestling a lion, which had been taken, was recreated in 1947. The whole complex is part of the UNESCO listing for Saint Petersburg and related monuments.
Across the bay, the fort of Krasnaya Gorka and the other coastal batteries are part of the wartime story, as they held out against the invaders. The town of Peterhof, with about seventy thousand people, has fuel, restaurants and plenty of shops, though in summer the roads to the palace fill with tour buses. Ol'gino, a little east, is smaller.
For a rider, the old Peterhof Highway from Saint Petersburg is an easy run, wide and fast, with traffic lights and heavy trucks. The park itself is for walking, not riding, and the gardens are best seen on a weekday morning, before the crowds. The fountains run from May to early autumn, and the water, moving through the park on gravity alone, is a wonder. In October the leaves turn gold and the fountains are switched off with a ceremony.