St. Petersburg is set to open a sprawling, immersive theme park that will bring iconic Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s fairy tales and poems to life in 2023.
Considered the founder of modern Russian literature, Pushkin wrote some of Russia’s most famous fairy tales and epic poems and remained popular through Soviet times and into the present.
Dutch design company Jora Vision will use Pushkin’s works as inspiration for the 17,000-square-meter Lukomorye park, named after the mythical Slavic land in which Pushkin’s fairy tales take place.
“We love unique and meaningful stories, and are excited to harness our skills to bring these local stories to life to an audience which is not yet very familiar with the concept of theme parks and immersive attractions,” Jora Vision CEO Jan Maarten de Raad said in a press release Tuesday.
The amusement park will consist of three zones — a palace, a city and a harbor — each based on imaginary places in Pushkin’s stories. The park will also feature a swan lake, a fairytale forest and a “yarmarka,” or Russian fair market.
In June 2019, local media reported the park’s construction costs to be at 1 billion rubles ($16.2 million).
The interactive park, which will be populated by actors playing famous heroes from Pushkin’s stories, will stage carnivals, performances and master classes. While the park is still in its conceptual stage, visitors can expect to be able to learn about Pushkin’s life in an “immersive walkthrough experience,” Jora Vision says.
