Neva

Before Peter's city, the delta was a marshy borderland of Novgorod, with Votic and Izhorian villages scattered through the forest. In the Time of Troubles the Swedes moved in, building the fortress of Nyenskans in 1611 where the Okhta flows into the Neva, and the Treaty of Stolbovo of 1617 left all of Ingria to Sweden. Many Orthodox villagers left, and Lutheran settlers from Savonia and the Karelian Isthmus took their place. Beside the fortress grew Nyen, a trading town of some 2,000 Finns and Swedes and from 1642 the capital of Swedish Ingria. In the Great Northern War the Swedes, fearing a Russian attack, emptied the town and burned it in 1702, and on 1 May 1703 Peter the Great took Nyenskans and laid out his new city on the land around it.