MARIANA SEMKINA / ST PETERSBURG

some inedible ingredients. It also happened to coincide with a couple of coldest winters in decades (I’m talking -32 cold) so in addition to the total lack of food and fear that you won't survive the night because the bomb will land on your house it was deadly cold. There wasn't enough food so people had to burn anything that'll burn to warm up.

At some point around 100k

people were dying a month

and it was pretty difficult to deal with the amount of dead bodies, they were lying everywhere on the streets. The radio was working everywhere around the city and people listened to warnings of incoming bombs - and when no one was talking to them, there was a sound of a metronome clicking through the city centre, sending everyone a message that the radio isn't broken, it's just quiet, but they can rest assured it'll be there when they will need to be alerted of anything. Even now the city administration plays the sound of the metronome around the dates connected to the siege.

This is something no one in the city will ever forget because the consequences of those 872 days were too heavy to ever shake off. Leningrad got the title of the first official "Hero City" of Russia and both Anna Akhmatova and Dmitry Shostakovich lived through the siege and a lot of their masterpieces were based on the terrifying experience. And I also have to add - despite the horrors, people were really trying to keep up some resemblance of normality of life and even the theatre was still operating, because one thing that Russian people

Words by Marjana Semkina

RECORD SHOPS

My favourite one and a good friend of my band is Phonoteka - a wonderful little gem in the city centre, run by true music lovers. You will always find a good conversation, some coffee and wonderful records in this one. And sometimes even Iamthemorning gig tickets!.

You can keep upto date with all things Mariana at: linktr.ee/ marjanasemkina