Vyborg (; ; ; ; ) is a town in, and the administrative center of, Vyborgsky District in Leningrad Oblast, Russia. It lies on the Karelian Isthmus near the head of the Vyborg Bay, to the northwest of St. Petersburg, east of the Finnish capital Helsinki, and south of Russia's border with Finland, where the Saimaa Canal enters the Gulf of Finland. The population of Vyborg is as follows: Located in the boundary zone between the East Slavic/Russian and Finnish worlds, formerly well known as one of the few medieval towns in Finland, Vyborg has changed hands several times in history, most recently in 1944 when the Soviet Union captured it from Finland during World War II. Finland evacuated the entire population of the city and resettled them within the rest of the country. On March 25, 2010, Dmitry Medvedev named Vyborg the "City of Military Glory". In Russia, a city can be awarded that title if there have been fierce battles in or near the city and in the Russian view, the defenders of the homeland have shown bravery, perseverance, and general heroism. During the Finnish Civil War in 1918, Vyborg was officially the second-most significant city in Finland after Helsinki, representing it as Finland's most multicultural city internationally. The city hosts the Russian end of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, laid in 2011 and operated by a consortium led by Russia's Gazprom state hydrocarbons enterprise to pump of natural gas a year under the Baltic Sea to Lubmin, Germany. History Early history According to archeological research, the area of what is now Vyborg used to be a trading center on the Vuoksi River's western branch, which has since dried up. The region was inhabited by the Karelians, a Balto-Finnic tribe which gradually came under the domination of Novgorod and Sweden. It has been claimed that Vyborg appeared in the 11th–12th centuries as a mixed Karelian-Russian settlement, although there is no archeological proof of any East Slavic settlement of that time in the area and it is not mentioned in any earliest historical documents, such as the Novgorod First Chronicle or the Primary Chronicle. Wider settlement in the area of Vyborg is generally regarded to date from 13th century onwards when Hanseatic traders began traveling to Novgorod. Vyborg Castle was founded during the Third Swedish Crusade in 1293 by marsk Torkel Knutsson on the site of an older