After a day of beautiful weather, we pay the price today: it pours almost the entire day. Having visited (or not) the palaces on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, today we turn our attention to sights not yet seen in the city itself. Our starting point is the Fortress of Peter and Paul, strategically set on island with a commanding position over the Neva. Inside the fortress is the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, whose spire is visible from all over St. Petersburg, and which serves as the necropolis for the Russian imperial family.

We have gotten used to transiting in the city – first a bus, then a metro, then another bus or a walk. When we leave the hotel, it seems the rain has stopped, for the sun is peeking out. The rain holds off until we have gone down into the metro, but as we exit, it is simply pouring.

Greg: The central line of the metro system of St. Petersburg is truly beautiful and well worth a visit if not a ride. Built in the mid-1950s, most stations are tunnelled deep under the city and are a glorious tribute to the former Soviet Union. I time our steep descent on the escalator today at over two minutes, straight down and moving fast. Each station is themed and trimmed out in marble with exquisite light fixtures and other finishes. There is no graffiti evident and you truly feel like you are stepping back in time to a different era and way of thinking, to the Soviet Union of our childhood: cold, threatening and dominant, powerful and icon driven. But still so beautiful.

We walk from the metro to the fortress, glad of our umbrellas, but wishing we had worn our rain jackets as well. Oh well – there are sights to be seen!

First we visit the Cathedral – almost the 1st thing built in the fortress, its steeple so high to show the Swedes they had lost this territory for good. Much tinier than anticipated, given its prominence on the skyline, we enter. Truly an Orthodox church, with its wall of icons shielding the inner sanctum from our view, and of course no pews (people stand and prostrate themselves during Russian Orthodox services, but do not sit), what immediately grabs your attention are the simple marble tombs, may 1 metre high by 1.5 metres wide by 2 metres long, which house the remains of every tsar and tsarina from Peter the Great on. Marked only by a simple cross, they are unexpectedly sober, given the opulence of everything else in St. Petersburg.


From left: the spire and dome of the Cathedral of Peter and Paul; the dome from inside the Cathedral; inside the Cathedral – at the bottom left is the marble grave of one of the tsars

When we look at the tomb of Paul I, whose home Pavlovsk we visited yesterday, Nico tells us that he wasn’t originally allowed to be buried here, because he was murdered so soon after ascending the throne that he was never crowned, and burial in the Cathedral of Peter and Paul was deemed inappropriate – until somebody changed their mind, and he was moved from the Nevsky Monastery, where the immediate families of the tsars are buried.

There is a huge crowd gathered in one corner of the room, and we move over to see what they are gawking at – which turns out to be, in a room at the back of the cathedral, the burial place of Nicholas II and Alexandra, together with their children. Although their bones were discovered in 1991, it was only through DNA testing conducted in 1998 that the remains were conclusively identified as theirs, and that they were buried here (and in this way the children are the exception to the rule that only tsars and tsarinas are buried in the Cathedral).

From the Cathedral we visit the prison – where those charged or convicted of treason were held and executed. Not a place that we would want to spend much time!

From here we walk the ramparts of the walls of the fortress, and despite the driving rain, the view over the Neva River to the Hermitage is spectacular.


The Winter Palace, with the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Spire of the Admiralty, from the ramparts at the Fortress of Peter and Paul

Because of the rain we change our plans – which had been to visit the Aurora, the ship that fired the shot that started the October Revolution – and head instead for the Alexander Nevskiy Monastery. Nevskiy is honoured as a hero in Russia – in the 12th century he fought the Swedes for control of the Neva delta, and won, keeping the Swedes away for over 400 years. The Neva and the Nevskiy Prospekt are both named in his honour. The Monastery is one of the most important in the Russian Orthodox Church, and was even allowed by the Soviets to continue as a monastery despite 70+ years of official atheism.


The Alexander Nevskiy Monastery

From the Nevskiy Monastery, we go to the Trinity Cathedral, yet another beautiful church, white Georgian façade with Doric columns, almost like the Royal Crescent in Bath or the Nash Terraces in London, with 4 domes painted royal blue. Allowed to decay by the Soviets, the church is undergoing a major reconstruction at the moment. This is a church that is far different from the more normal baroque of St. Petersburg. Interestingly, one of the things that is being rebuilt is a monument that sat in front of the church for many years, manufactured from Turkish guns and cannons captured during one of the Russian-Turkish wars. This monument was melted down 75 or 80 years ago, as were the lamp standards that were made of 3 cannons welded together, but is being refabricated, which explains the cannons lying on the grass outside the church.

We take the Metro back to the Nevskiy Prospekt – we still haven’t walked it, and walk it we must. We come out at the half-way point, the Moscow Station, and walk toward the Palace Square. Busy despite the rain, it is an amazing promenade, hard to believe that it was laid out almost 300 years ago.


Along the Nevskiy Prospekt: From left: the statue of Catherine II (the Great); the Alexander Theatre; the Kazan Cathedral

As we walk along, the rain finally stops. We walk further, stopping in a few stores, buying nothing. We find a restaurant for dinner, and then it is time to say goodbye to Nico, for we leave St. Petersburg tomorrow. I am very sad to say goodbye – Nico has been a wonderful guide, getting us around safely, explaining nuances that are not apparent to us, and he has become our friend. Thank you, Nico! We have enjoyed spending time with you!

Happy 4th of July to all our American friends

Sunday in Russia is like a romantic Seurat painting: everyone is out in the parks and by the canals and the rivers, enjoying the warm sunny weather on their one day liberated from work. Families eating ice cream, and couples, the men smartly dressed, the women with their lipstick just so, walking or sitting on park benches holding hands, some drinking a beer, others possibly some cold vodka. Several are picnicking, some are playing volleyball, all seem to be enjoying the fact that summer has arrived, for today at least.

We too are having a Sunday in the park and our train is crowded with day-trippers heading from St. Petersburg to the same spot we are. We are all taking the 40 minute train ride south to Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo, the palaces of Paul I and Catherine the Great and the wonderful parks and woodlands that surround them. The citizens of St. Petersburg seem to take great advantage of their many public parks and the vast expanses of palace garden and green space available to them both in and outside of the city. Today seems to be no exception.

We arrive in the town of Pavlovsk and enter the palace grounds through the back entrance. We walk through beautiful old growth forests, along long-abandoned horse and carriage roads heading toward the palace, passing formal ponds and beautiful, slightly overgrown vistas. It isn’t hard to picture the sylvan landscapes painted by artists over two hundred and twenty five years ago.


From Left: The approach to the Pavlosk; Paul himself; the main courtyard of Pavlosk

The Pavlovsk, the reconstructed palace of Paul I, the first son of Catherine the Great and his bride Maria, is more humble and ultimately less touristy than Peterhof, but we still suffer the sharp elbows of some Russian tourists vying for viewing time in this more intimate palace. We walk through, and are reminded of the destruction that the Germans left behind as they retreated after their failed siege of Leningrad during WWII through the many photographs displayed throughout. (In fact, all of the palaces on the outskirts of St. Petersburg that we see were in territory occupied by the Germans, and were left in similar shape, and Peterhof, Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo have been to a large extent, and continue to be, completely restored to their original splendour.) The palace has a grand but still intimate feel; like visiting your very rich relatives in their home.



Inside the Pavlovsk

We have brought our lunch with us and grab a shady bench and are amused at the Russian tourists enthralled with a seemingly never-before-seen squirrel doing his squirrel thing. We watch as the locals squeal and chase the squirrel, imagining him some wild exotic animal, trying to get him to pose for pictures. We cringe as the squirrel runs all over them, stopping to eat what they offer.

We jump on one of the local mini-buses and it drops us at the lower gates of the Tsarskoe Selo: the Catherine Palace. Created by the Empress Elizabeth and significantly expanded by Catherine the Great, it is one of the largest and grandest of them all.


The approach to the Catherine Palace

We spend some time walking around the extensive grounds viewing the many buildings that were built and designed for sometimes a single task: breakfast for the royals in the morning house or tea in the afternoon across the Grand Pond in a smaller pavilion. The day is sunny and actually quite hot and we are enjoying being out in t-shirts again.



The grounds of Tsarskoe Selo

We continue our promenade up to the main “house” and approach by the Cameron Gallery and immediately spot a line up for entrance into the palace. We are faced with the same dilemma we faced at Peterhof - long lines and no access to the main house. Nico has an idea about trying to get us into the palace as part of a tour group but we will have to make our way all the way around the building and negotiate with a tour operator. Needless to say this proves to be unsuccessful and as we wind our way back to the main line up, I opt to stand in line while John and Nico continue to explore the beautiful grounds. Individuals are only allowed to purchase entrance tickets to the Catherine Palace between 4 and 6 pm and the palace closes at 7 pm. There is a large crowd waiting to get into the palace and after an hour and a half of standing in the sun and moving perhaps 5 feet towards the main entrance, at 5:30 we decide to leave the line and head for home.



The view from outside the palace

While we are disappointed that we have not been able to see the glorious interiors of the Catherine Palace, we are happy to have had a wonderfully warm and sunny day to enjoy the parks and the Russian people.


We bid farewell to the Catherine Palace

We are off to Peterhof today. The 2nd summer palace of Peter the Great, it was built on the site of a former Swedish fortress (as were most of the great country palaces of the tsars) to show that the Swedes, who had controlled the Neva delta for hundreds of years, and who had thus denied Russia a port on the Baltic, had been truly vanquished from this part of the world.

We take a hydrofoil from the Palace Embankment across the Gulf of Finland to Peterhof – a 30 minute journey which takes you to the sea entrance, the entrance used by the tsars. We have a bit of time to get to know Nico a bit better – currently studying web construction and design, he was educated in Soviet military academies, and served in the army during the period in which the USSR dissolved. We pry, we hope not too much, into life in the military, and the experience of serving while the country you are serving is disintegrating. After leaving the military, he returned from Belarus to St. Petersburg and was a policeman before deciding to return to school.

The 3 palaces at Peterhof (the Great Palace, the Marli Palace and the Mon Plaisir Palace, while beautiful, are not the main event; the fountains are. Entering from the sea as we do, they are almost the first thing we see – at the top of the canal that leads up from the Finnish Gulf, situated just below the Great Palace.


Approaching Peterhof from the Gulf of Finland


The Golden Cascade

We ooh and ah over the Golden Cascade, then turn our attention to the Great Palace; unfortunately, everyone else has decided to do the same, and as we look at the long line of people patiently queuing, we decide to focus on the grounds and fountains instead. We walk towards the Marly Palace and the Hermitage. The Hermitage at Peterhof was the first one built by the Russian czars, long predating the more famous Hermitage attached to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. It was used as a dining room, surrounded by a moat to ensure solitude, and employed a clever mechanical device, whereby the table was set and the food served in the basement, and the table was then raised to the main level, so that the servants did not intrude on the tsar and his guests.


From left: The Hermitage at Peterhof; the Marly Palace

We walk past many fountains as we wonder the grounds, marvelling at the fact that they all date to the first half of the 1700s, and all operate solely on gravity. Some of the fountains are quite whimsical – these are mainly designed to help you cool down on a hot day, by gushing out of a bench that you may have unsuspectingly sat on, or by coming out of the ground when you step on certain rocks by the side of a pond


Fountains at Peterhof

We are all dragging by this point, and we leave the palace complex by the main entrance, on its land side. We walk the short distance to Petrodvorets, the town outside the palace gates.


The main entry to Peterhof

In Petrodvorets, we go to the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, built in a very different style that that of baroque St. Petersburg. Although the second Cathedral of Peter and Paul built by Peter the Great (the first still stands inside the Fortress of Peter and Paul, in St. Petersburg), this is clearly not a cathedral built to be used by the imperial family – despite the gold of its icons, it is on the inside a very simple church.


The Cathedral of Peter and Paul in Petrodvorets

We grab a minibus back to the last stop on one of the metro lines in St. Petersburg, take the metro into the centre, then grab a bus to the hotel, where we collapse, our feet and our bodies tired. Dinner tonight is at a little café across the street from the Mariinsky Theatre, then it is early to bed.

Happy Birthday to Janet Sinclair on July 4!

Today we are doing the Hermitage. We allow ourselves to sleep in a bit, and head out late in the morning. We are on our own for today – Nico is with other guests, 2 Canadians from Vancouver, as it turns out. So we get instructions from the hotel about how to get to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and we will walk from there.

The Hermitage Museum occupies 5 buildings in its main site (and 3 satellites here in St. Petersburg, as well as in a few major cities around the world). The main building is actually the Winter Palace, the St. Petersburg home of the tsars until the Revolution, which has since been part of the Museum. The other 4 buildings are the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre. The first hermitage at the Winter Palace was established by Catherine the Great, an avid collector of art, as a place for her to inspect her art: she built the Small Hermitage as the place to do this, and over the years, the Old and New Hermitages were added by other tsars. But the collection was so vast (including art owned by major families, such as the Yusupov’s, that was “donated” to the Hermitage after the Revolution) that the Winter Palace was also required to display it.


The Winter Palace, Palace Square and the Alexander Column

We make our way into the Museum and shortly find ourselves very frustrated – none of the signs are in English. 500 rubles later (C$25), we own a wonderful guidebook to the Museum, and begin our exploration in earnest. We actually start in the farthest reaches, the Impressionist Galleries on the 2nd floor of the Winter Palace. We go through room after room – amazing! There are 3 rooms of Picasso alone, well over 100 canvasses, all predating the revolution. They are displayed more or less chronologically, and it is an amazing display of the development of his technique over time. From the Picasso, we walk into rooms of Matisse, where Rodin sculptures punctuate the canvasses. One of the things that I love about the Hermitage is that its collections are so vast that they do have numerous works by one artist – and they display all the works of that artist in contiguous display. It is so rare to see this depth in a collection, and it is such a wonderful way of learning about the artist’s technique.

We head to the State Rooms, overwhelming in their ostentation. We go through room after gilded room. It is incomprehensible the amount of wealth on display in these rooms – and that doesn’t count the art on the walls.

From the State Rooms we head to the New Hermitage, to the Dutch collection – almost as big as the collection at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (which was closed for renovation when we were in Amsterdam), including rooms of Rembrandt. We never make it to the Rembrandt – we spend hours exploring, and are so overwhelmed that we agree to begin working our way out before we find the Rembrandts (although I know, from my previous visit, that there are rooms of Rembrandts somewhere in the building). The shortest exit route takes us to the Old Hermitage, then through the Small Hermitage, and back into the Winter Palace, with new things to see all along the way, even in the parts we’ve already been to.




Around the Hermitage Museum

We head back to our hotel for a short break before we head to the opera tonight. On the way, we discover one of the strange little facts of life in St. Petersburg – trolleys and buses with the same numbers ply the same routes, but go to different places in the end. The first number 22 that comes along is a trolley, and we jump on, not knowing this. We talk excitedly about the Hermitage and what we have seen, and all of a sudden there is a woman telling us that we must get off the bus. We are at the end of the line, and we have no idea where we are. All we know is that we haven’t gone by the stop where we got on bus 22 this morning. It takes us a few minutes to find someone who speaks enough English that they can point to where we are on the English-language map we have – we are a 10 minute walk from our hotel. Off we go, and we indulge in a Russian pastime as we go – we buy 2 bottles of beer, and drink as we walk, feeling like naughty schoolboys, although almost everyone we encounter on the walk is doing the same thing. This strange mistake allows us to discover a forgotten area of St. Petersburg – New Holland – an island that was a timberyard, built in the 1760’s but that has been abandoned for years, and a number of abandoned palaces.


From left: New Holland; abandoned palace

After short naps (we decide to forego dinner – the curtain is at 7:00 p.m.), we head out to the Mariinsky Theatre, a short walk from our hotel. This theatre, built in the 1860s and named after the Tsar’s wife, is one of the most famous ballet and opera venues in the world. Renamed the Kirov after the Revolution, it has gone back to its former name. Although this theatre is only 140 years old, there has been a theatre here for much longer – the signs on the theatre tell us that this season is the 221st.

We make it to our seats just in time to see that the theatre is surprisingly small before the lights go down – which means that although we are in the 5th (and highest) ring, we are actually quite close to the stage. Tonight’s opera is Eugene (or Yevgeny) Onegin, which neither of us have seen before. We watch, enraptured! Tchaikovsky’s music is beautiful, and this opera is so unlike most grand opera – it is about real people and the mistakes they make.

The signing is superb, the soprano playing Tatiana a joy to listen to – which, given her long solo in Act 1, is a good thing! At the 1st intermission, we read our programs and find that this version of the opera, co-produced with Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, is a highly unusual Onegin – seasons have been changed, Onegin is not superior but instead has been wounded in love, and perhaps most importantly, Prince Gremin is not old but is young and handsome. The time passes too quickly, and the opera is over. The audience bravos and bravos the cast – not only Tatiana but also Onegin, Gremin and Lensky. The ovations go on for at least 10 minutes, and many bouquets are presented to the artists.

Nico is waiting outside with his friend Elias, an Algerian studying in St. Petersburg to become a veterinarian, and the 4 of us head off for a drink. We walk along canals, and end up in Hay Square, which has been completely renovated in honour of St. Petersburg’s 300th birthday last year. We sit in a café and have a beer, then Elias heads off while Nico, Greg and I have a couple more beers. At about 2:00 a.m., we decide that we’re ready for bed, although the sky is still quite light. Nico tells us that although the sun isn’t visible, this is about as dark as it will get, and the sun will start to rise within the hour.

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Happy Canada Day to everyone back home!

It is a relatively calm and stress free morning as we head to St. Petersburg. The weather still seemingly against us – it is cool, wet and a north wind is blowing as we head to the station for our train ride into Russia. Kouvola is as I imagined a Finnish outpost on the Russian border to be – bleak and barren, 1950s dull, with a hint of pulp and paper mill in the air. Someone in Helsinki had asked us why we were going to Kouvola – I understand why.


At the train station in Kouvola

The train is about 15 minutes late but I don’t take that as an omen of things to come. Before when I travelled, these little indicators – late trains, misread maps, or lost tickets – meant that something terrible was about to happen. Now I take this all in stride. The train is not full but we are surrounded by Finns and Russians and three Japanese gentlemen who look like they are travelling to St. Petersburg for business. We get settled without incident and John pulls out a New Yorker he has been saving and I grab a crossword that I have been saving. The green pine and birch forests drift by the train windows as we relax into our seats.


Half and hour into our journey the very jolly gentleman right across from me leans over and asks, in heavily accented Finnish, if I am from Canada. He thought that I must be because he recognized my French accent! I am at a loss for words, firstly because I can’t believe he pegged me so accurately and so quickly, and secondly for the French accent. I politely (because I am a Canadian) say “Why yes, I am, but I don’t have a French accent….” He insists and I am still so dumbfounded that I don’t argue. I discover that he has lived in Canada for 45 years and he works in construction, roofs, eaves troughs, etc, etc. and that his daughter lives in Whitby and he lives in Oshawa. The most important information exchanged, he explains to me that he is travelling with his wife and his sister, her son, his wife and their daughter. Soon we are all engaged in animated conversation about Canada, politics, Finland, real estate and life in general.

We also discover that our Finnish/Canadian friend is returning for the first time since he was 8 years old to his hometown of Vyborg with his family: about 1/3 of the population of Finland lived in the Karelia Peninsula, and were forced to flee in the early 1940s because of the Russian invasion. It remains an emotional and sometimes hotly disputed episode in the Finish history. As we pull into the train station in Vyborg, the sister stands and begins to point out the major land marks of the quaint town, almost to herself. Soon the family is engaged in their memories and history as the train shudders to a stop and they wait for their passports which, along with ours, were confiscated at the Finnish/Russian border by stereotypical looking Russian officials.

I feel honoured and somewhat humbled by what I have just witnessed.

St. Petersburg beckons and we arrive at the new Ladoga Station at about 2:30. Our guide for this part of the journey, Nico, is waiting for us on the platform. A negotiated taxi ride later, we are in our hotel on a very quiet canal in the Kolomna area of the city, a short distance from the St. Nicholas Cathedral and the Mariinsky Theatre. We drop our bags and start our first day in St. Petersburg.


From left: St. Isaac’s; The Admiralty; The Winter Palace with the Alexander Column


From left: The Admiralty (foreground) & the Fortress of Peter and Paul (background); around the Nevskiy Prospekt; The Church of the Spilt Blood

We happily cram in all the major sights in about 3 hours of walking around before we take a boat cruise through the Fontanka and Moika rivers, seeing some wonderful architecture. We are rewarded at every turn by beautiful examples of Baroque, Imperial and Art Nouveau – some beautifully restored and some just waiting. St. Petersburg is an incredible visual city: everywhere you look you are overwhelmed by the beauty and variety of architecture, history and spectacle. Our eyes drink it all in.

The sun is still high in the sky as we settle into a restaurant opposite the Kazan Cathedral on the Nevskiy Prospekt, where Nico persuades us to toast our arrival in the traditional Russian way – with cold Russian vodka (more, when all is said and done, than is wise), some borscht, and the raucous, Russian daylight/nightlife taking place just outside the restaurant door.

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