Thawing Feelings festival 

If you can’t wait to welcome spring, this is the perfect event for you! For this year’s edition of the annual Thawing Feelings festival, the Botanical Garden team has gone all in: the festival features two exhibitions – of tulips and of botanic-themed watercolors – a tour of the subtropical collection (including blooming camellias and azaleas), as well as a visit to the botanical museum. After this experience, you are sure to overcome every freezing challenge that St. Petersburg has in store for 2021! You can buy tickets at the Garden or online.

Victorian style intelligent flea market

  • February 27-28, 12 pm - 9 pm  
  • Lendok
  • Free

Intelligent flea markets are regular city events where you are sure to find that perfect dress or coffee cup you’ve spent ages looking for – lovingly made by a local designer and sold at a reasonable price. What more can you ask for? Okay, the market actually offers much more: interesting freshly-made food from all corners of the world, great music, and a chance to meet quite an interesting audience among both those buying and selling. This time, you will also dive deep into that cozy Victorian atmosphere with every element present – from tea leaves and Tarot fortune telling to live piano and perfumed soap. Don’t forget to spend the night before reading your favourite period novel for an even greater effect!

Dark Jazz concert 

I am sorry, but I can’t resist referencing La La Land one more time while writing about a jazz concert at a planetarium – it’s simply impossible! Just picture it: you are virtually floating in space while live music is born right in front of you – or seemingly all around you, eventually becoming one with the galaxies and stars surrounding you. If that’s not the closest thing to lucid dreaming, then I don’t know what is. Allow yourself this journey across our universe. You can find the tickets here.

Intentional city exhibition 

You don’t have to be an analog photography geek to recognize the superiority of large format prints over any kind of digital picture – film gives you the chance to feel the spaces you see and become lost in the intricate patterns of light inside them. At this exhibition marking Dostoevsky’s 200th anniversary of birth, you will see photographs made by Valery Degtyarev, one of St. Petersburg’s oldest living photographers. The pictures were taken between 1998 and 2008 and capture various corners of the city, reimagining their meaning for Dostoevsky’s characters. Enjoy the complex printing techniques and travel back in time through the lens of an analog camera. Don’t forget to buy your tickets online here.