St. Petersburg May 30-31, 2001
St. Petersburg was Swedish territory when the Czar Peter1st decided
Russia needed a European port. It had been Russian before hand, but for
more than 300 years it had been Swedish. The Swedes were no pushover, but
ultimately, Peter won out.
His thoughts that he needed a European port are hard to argue, and since St.
Petersburg is at the mouth of a river connected to Moscow, it sounds like an
ideal place. However, in reality, there was nothing here but swamp
land. If he had not had an unlimited amount of serf labor, they probably
could not have built here. But tons of earth fill was brought in (by hand
mostly) and millions of trees were cut down and driven into the ground as piles,
and as anybody can see, there is a city here.
| Our days here started out with an all day tour of the area. We
queued up to get off the boat, queued up to get through immigration, then
got on our busses. In reality, they have everything well assembled,
but there are a bunch of queues. Our first stop was at the Cathedral
of St. Isaac, the 3rd largest domed cathedral in the world (after Rome,
then London). Unfortunately we couldn't go inside, but as you can
see, it was pretty. |
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We then drove around the city a bit (killing time as much as intending
to see things) and stopped at Smolny Institute. This started out as
a Nunnery (that was the intention) but when the Czarina decided she really
didn't want to do all that stuff, she converted it into a finishing school
for the ladies who attended her. Inside we got a very nice formal
concert of acapella music (group of about 30). |
| We then drove out to a Restaurant in the country for lunch. This
is supposed to be typical of an old country inn in the middle of Russia,
but in fact it is a new build with foreign capital. However, they
served us a traditional Russian meal (borsch soup and stuffed cabbage
rolls were the highlight, sidelights were red Caviar, Champagne and Vodka) |
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Lunch was served by people in (theoretically) native costumes (probably
authentic in design, but I don't believe they had mini-skirts in the
1800's) and we had musical accompaniment. The music was quite good
even if they did slide in Dr. Zhivago which I believe was written in the
US.
The picture here is their singer who has some sort of clapper
device. They would have let us buy them, but we decided Marybeth
would be upset if we got Robbie another noise maker. |
| The pièce de resistance of the tour was The Catherine Palace, a summer palace. Catherine the 1st was the wife of Peter the Great. He
built the section you see here for her. Peter's daughter, Elizabeth, built
on quite a bit, and Catherine II (the Great) added her part later. Elizabeth's
nephew married Catherine II (when both were very young) and quite a bit later, after 6 months of
his reign, she deposed him to become Czarina in fact as well as
name. This photograph is only of the center of the palace, it's less
than 1/4 of the full palace. |
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Internally, the palace is all Baroque, and carried to an extreme.
This room is where the Military Officers would eat when not attending the
Czarina, so you get an idea what her quarters looked like. It is
important to note that the German's occupied this building during the 900
day siege of St. Petersburg, and trashed it before retreating. So
everything you see here is restoration, done as faithfully as possible,
but restoration none the less. |
| We ended up the day downtown across from The Church of the
Resurrection. This shows the classic Romanesque architecture used
everywhere and the Russian attempts at excess in ornamentation.
During the Soviet era, this church was closed and it currently is a
museum. Many of the closed churches were given back to their
congregations and are being reopened, but not this one.
Across from the cathedral was a fairly extensive flea market where you
could buy all the traditional dolls, scarves, books and the preferred
currency was US $. Most of the store keepers had excellent
commercial English (we didn't attempt to check out their general
conversation). |
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Wednesday
evening we went out to a stage show featuring traditional music and
dancing. This troupe has toured internationally, and we believe even
visited Midland (but we didn't see them their). The singing was the
traditional 5 part female with 3 part male support that sounds so unique and is
fun to listen to. The dancing was very energetic and included dances from
Russia, Bohemia and the Gypsies.
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Thursday morning started awful early (late night, but technically early
also as we had to pick up our bus at 7:15). We had to travel nearly
an hour and 1/2 into the country and were due back at 12:30, so you really
need to work to get any real touring done. Our first stop (just a
leg stretch really) was The Church of Peter and Paul (but the one at
Peterhof, not the one in St. Petersburg). The insides didn't open
till 11:00, so we grabbed a picture and got back on the bus. |
| We were heading out to the palaces at Oranienbaum (literally Orange
Tree). The first one was a pseudo fort that was built for Military
Games (literally) by Peter III, but since they used live cannon, most of
it was burned down. This photo shows how lovely the area was
however, but the buildings that remained were quite small. |
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The second palace was built by Catherine the Great solely as a show off
place. There was no attempt ever (nor intent) to live in the place,
but she would travel out here, invite people in for business, let them be
awed and return.
The lake shown here was built artificially, but it was no problem as
there is plenty of water. |
| This has become known as the Chinese palace because 3 rooms were
finished in the Chinese style. This one you can see is in the
baroque style, but the parquet floor and the paintings are gorgeous.
Unlike many other buildings, these were not trashed during WW II, so what
you see is the original. This is the primary claim to fame of these
buildings. |
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Our third castle was Count Menshikov's Palace. Apparently this was
all funded by embezzling money from the government, but Peter didn't pay
any attention. Shortly after Elizabeth took over, Menshikov was off
to Siberia and she had the palace. |
| The palace consists of a central building (shown above), two long
galleries which were used to house the guests, and two end sections, the
use of which is unknown (see right). This building is in poor repair
(as this photo shows) and only 3 rooms (better titled ruins according to
our guide) are available to be seen inside. |
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We got
back from the tour at 12:30, and had a 1:15 call for the afternoon tour, so we
[pretty much] ran up the 8 flights of stairs to the cafeteria, grabbed a quick
brat and hot dog, then back down 5 flights of stairs to the collection
point. We got to sit there less than 10 minutes when our bus was called
and off we went.
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Thursday afternoon we spent at the Hermitage. The photo to the
left is actually the winter palace, but since 1918, this has been an annex
to the Hermitage (instead of the reverse which was Catherine's
plan). I took no photos inside (although it was allowed, much to my
surprise), but we had a grand time looking at central European
painters. |
| It was very nice to be back on the
boat at 5:30 with no obligations. We watched them pull the boat out of the
slip and around the corner (see right). I got some of these pictures edited,
then we went up to the front lounge and watched the boat leaving St. Petersburg. |
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You've all heard that the sun sets late up here. Well, here's
graphic proof. I took this picture at 11:30 PM. We're getting
close to "mid summer festival" as it's called here, and there
isn't very much dark. |
