St Petersburg: It was nearly midnight here Thursday as fans headed back into the city from Russia’s 3-1 win over Egypt, but the sky was still bright.
The World Cup’s taking place during the ‘white nights’, when the sun barely sets and it never gets completely dark. It’s impossible to ignore here, the northernmost host city, where white nights are associated with beauty, hedonism and even madness.
Around the longest day of the year, it begins to get a little darker around 11pm, reaching a kind of inky-blue twilight after 1am. Two hours later and it’s light again. “I don’t sleep at night. I just nap,” said Egyptian fan Sam.
It’s caused problems for England player Dele Alli, whose team is based just outside the city. “I woke up at three in the morning and I thought it was time to get up,” he told British media. The team has installed blackout blinds to minimize disruption.
“It’s impossible (to fall asleep) if you go to bed after it starts to get light again,” computer programmer Bogdan Bovin said after Tuesday’s game. “If that happens, it’s better just not to go try to sleep. You just have to walk around all night,” he added.
Those midnight wanderings have become a staple of Russian literature, such as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story ‘White Nights’. A lonely narrator and a beautiful girl meet night after night in a tale of unrequited love and loneliness.
The white nights are natural, but they feel unnatural. Alexander Pushkin’s poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, a Russian classic, has the poet describing how he can read without a lamp on a moonless night, before depicting the city as a whirl of sensations, almost delirious. The city then suffers an apocalyptic flood which drowns the poem’s hero.
White nights are a boon for tour operators like Alexei Filippov, who runs night-time boat cruises through the city’s canals, past imperial palaces in the twilight. “It’s a great show,” he said. “It’s never too late to go out.”