The midnight bells are tolling, and the summer sun hangs low over the Winter Palace. It’s June in Saint Petersburg, and, like a giant baroque beehive, the streets of the old imperial capital are teeming with people. The sky is downy white, tinged with ice and amber, yet all eyes are on the dark currents of the Neva. Vodka and champagne glasses shyly clink amongst the captivated crowds and all the city holds its breath as orchestras build tension. Suddenly, in a roaring concerto of light and sound, fireworks erupt into the air, and applause surges through the crowds. They cascade downward and erupt like comets, whilst others burst open like flowers in spirals of silver, emerald and gold. Finally, amidst the neon light and aroma of gunpowder the distant figure of a ship comes sailing into harbour, its unfurled sails billowing bright-red like the capes of a dozen matadors.

This is the celebration of the Scarlet Sails, based on the beloved children’s novel of the same name by Alexander Grin. In the story, an ostracised girl is rescued from her village by a prince, who takes her aboard his red-sailed vessel. The celebration honours school graduates who represent the future of the country.

The romanticism of the evening and the celebration of a dazzling future is all the more poignant in Russia, which has endured immense suffering over the last century or so, from Tsarism to Communism and Nazism. What better place to celebrate the future of the country than the chic capital of Peter the Great, constructed as the jewel of a novel, modern Russia and whose cobblestones once rung with the footsteps of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky.

The Scarlet Sails festival, which takes place on the weekend nearest the Summer Solstice in late June, is attended by between 1.5 and 3 million people each year, making it one of the biggest celebrations in Russia. It is accompanied by a huge multimedia show, with extensive lights, music, fireworks, pyrotechnics and theatre throughout. In 2019  audiences were treated to experiences as diverse as medieval warriors climbing out of the Neva River and fedora-donning musicians playing rollicking swing music. It is therefore a true sensory experience and the combination of the music, lights and atmosphere as the ethereally beautiful ship passes makes for an unforgettable, and unmissable, experience.

The Scarlet Sails is the centrepiece of Saint Petersburg’s White Nights arts and culture celebrations, named for the bright Arctic evenings, which take place from late May into July. The main areas action throughout this period are the gorgeous Mariinksy Theatre, Hermitage Theatre and the Conservatoire. Here opera, ballet and classical music provide scintillating entertainment for urbane audiences, and visitors will marvel at all three buildings, examples of Tsarist opulence. For those more preoccupied with Russian heritage there is the Long Night of the Museums, wherein galleries and museums, which host everything from gorgeous art, military history and children’s dolls, stay thronged with visitors into the small hours of the morning.

If operas and artefacts sound like a snooze-fest there are more active pastimes to indulge in. You can take boat trips to watch the city’s drawbridges close, you can investigate the Peterhof neighbourhood where actors in period costume commandeer the streets, or you can indulge in a bit of gulyat’, the Russian art of wandering, and saunter round the canals. During the White Nights the city never sleeps: watch connoisseurs and dilettantes alike debate Chekov as they swill vodka and dumplings in swanky bistros, or plunge into the pulsing depths of Petersburg nightlife. The streets are filled with food carts offering local ice-cream called morozhenoe and watermelon, in case you need refreshment amidst the panoply of attractions. Once the tireless entertainment has been exhausted there is an ample supply of gold brocade hotels, which you can enjoy without fear of Bolshevik reprisal.

Not only is Saint Petersburg voguish and avant-garde, a Paris of the taiga, but all this intelligent indulgence takes place under the eldritch brightness of an undying, Northern sun. There is no comparable experience, and culture-vultures from all over the world should seriously consider making a pilgrimage to see the White Nights. From the nationally cherished Scarlet Sails Festival to the unfathomable wealth of bars, opera, music and museums; nobody should sleep easy until they can say that they have been for a gulyat’ down Nevsky Prospect under the glow of the midnight sun.