St. Petersburg

October 18, 2019

It is a cold, dank, foggy day in St. Petersburg.  A perfect day to be inside which is good because this morning we tour the Hermitage, the largest art gallery in the world and also one of the most important. The Hermitage today consists of 5 different buildings, all interconnected. The original building of the Hermitage was built by Catherine as her winter palace, her summer palace being in the countryside. Nine years ago we were on an ocean cruise from Dover, England, to Stockholm, Sweden that docked in St. Petersburg for two nights. On that visit to St. Petersburg we visited the Hermitage.  We decided to visit it again on this trip because of the rich treasure trove of art as well as the beauty of the building. We enjoyed our return visit. The building itself was no less stunning then the first time we saw it. While most of the art that we saw was not to our taste,  our lives were enriched by the several Rembrandts and Rubens that we saw.  There was also a hall of statuary that we enjoyed.

The Hermitage

Grand Staircase at The Hermitage

As you can imagine, Russia has many strange laws. One of them requires river boats to dock at a pier that is about five miles away from the city center of St. Petersburg. Depending on traffic, that can be a 25 to 45 minute trip.  We returned to the boat this morning after our visit to the Hermitage and were back on the bus after dinner to return to St. Petersburg for a “Russian Ballet experience.” 

Hermitage Theater

We did not find out until on board our boat that the ballet would take place at the Catherine Theater in the Hermitage and that the ballet we would see was Tchiakovsky’s “Swan Lake."  Needless to say we were thrilled. The theater, seating between 200 and 300 people, was as stunning as the rest of the Hermitage. The music was typical Tchaikovsky: at times bombastic, at other times light and ethereal, interspersed with soul wrenchingly beautiful melodies. The orchestra was somewhere around 30 to 35 pieces and played at a very high standard. The four main dance soloists were excellent, but, to our untrained eye, the corps de ballet did not demonstrate the precision of a top flight ballet company.  The four stars were truly top flight athletes. One look at their bodies, particularly their legs, in their tights, confirmed that.  Like all professional athletes they demonstrated strength and power. However, they also showed amazing balance, grace and fluidity not always shown by top sports figures but always on display with ballet dancers.  We read a synopsis of the ballet before it started, but because there was no dialogue we had to imagine when different parts of the story were taking place. The hero and the villain ended up competing for the fair maiden, in this case, a white swan who turns into a princess.  The last scene of the ballet featured the battle between the hero and villain. Evidently, in a ballet the battle consists of the two combatants leaping at each other until the hero rips something off of the villain who then dies in obvious agony. The hero and maiden then show their love for each other by performing a short dance together that ends with them in positions that are impossible for the human body to perform. Despite this rather tongue-in-check description of the end of the production we thoroughly enjoyed our first experience at the ballet.

Nevsky Prospekt

We did not get back to our cabins aboard ship until almost midnight last night. Nevertheless, we were on the bus Saturday morning at 8:00 for our “up close” tour of St. Petersburg.  It began with the bus taking us on a short ten minute ride to the nearest subway station for our subway ride into St. Petersburg. The city is built on a swamp so it was necessary to tunnel down over 100 meters(yards) in order to safely construct the entire system.  We took the worlds longest escalator, 89 meters long, down to the platform to catch the train. When we first got on the escalator we could not see the end of it. Leaving the train we came out of the station on Nevsky Prospekt, prospekt being a Russian word for avenue. Nevsky Prospekt is the main shopping street of St. Petersburg, much like 5th Avenue in New York or the Miracle Mile in Chicago. The street had an interesting blend of upscale shops, souvenir shops, cafes and food stores as well as McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks. While walking down Nevsky we stopped at a Russian Armenian Church that was interesting because it actually had pews where the people could sit during the worship service.  The other notable fact about the Armenian Church is that it had an altar similar to the altars we find at the front of our churches in the States. Russian Orthodox churches have what is called an iconostasis at the front of the church. An iconostasis is a wall containing icons of religious figures as well as two doors in the middle of the wall that lead to the altar behind the wall. Only the priest can enter through these doors.

Grocery store on Nevsky Prospekt

For the worshipers these doors represent the doors to heaven.

Our Lady of Kazan

Further down Nevsky Prospekt we came to the Church of our Lady of Kazan. Having heard of the wonders of St. Peter’s in Rome, one of the Czars had this church built as a miniature replica of St. Peter’s.  An icon of the Lady of Kazan, who represents the Virgin Mary, is on the iconostasis wall of this church. We witnessed a long line of people waiting to pray before this icon and then touch and kiss the icon hoping for their prayers to be answered. From Our Lady of Kazan we walked beside a canal to the Church of our Savior on Spilled Blood. The church gets its name because it was built on the site of the assassination of Emperor Alexander II.  Because this church is on the tour we are taking on Sunday we did not go inside.  We continued to walk along another of the many canals in St. Petersburg passing several foreign consulates as well as a different side of the Hermitage from what we had seen before. Our walk ended at the St. Isaacs Cathedral, one of the largest Cathedrals in Europe.  It was turned into a museum by the Soviets in 1917 and remains a museum today.   It was fun to walk along the streets of St. Petersburg and watch everyday Russians going about their everyday lives.  We spent the rest of Saturday relaxing and reading on the boat.

Our Lady of Kazan Icon

Church on Spilled Blood

Church on Spilled Blood

Sunday afternoon we took our last tour of the trip as our cruise officially ends tomorrow morning when we disembark the boat.  We have mentioned that St. Petersburg is sometimes called the “Venice of the North” because of all of its canals.  In fact, St. Petersburg has more canals then any other city in Europe. Before getting on a canal boat for our cruise we spent some time inside the Church of our Savior on Spilled Blood. We have been inside this church on a previous trip to St. Petersburg and consider it one of the most beautiful churches in Europe.  The entire interior of the church is decorated in mosaics. We did learn two new facts on this tour.  First, we had noticed previously inside at the back of the church a canopy but did not know that the canopy covered the exact spot where Alexander II was assassinated. There are cobblestones marking the spot.  We also learned why onion domes sit atop most Russian Orthodox Churches.  The onion dome is in the shape of the flame at the top of a candle so that these millions of onions domes throughout Russia represent candles of peace lit for all Russians.

Our canal boat cruise gave us a different view of St. Petersburg. While we saw most of the places we had already visited, seeing them from the water was different. We also cruised by the homes where Tchaikovsky and the famous Russian author, Alexander Pushkin, lived as well as mansions where the Czars and their families lived. We also saw, at a distance, the second largest mosque in Europe. From a distance it looked beautiful and we wished that we had time to visit it. This relaxing cruise was a nice way to end our trip to Russia.

Cruising St. Petersburg's Canals

Monday morning we left the Viking Ingvar at 6:00 a.m. taking the bus to St. Petersburg airport for our flight to London where we will spend three days before flying home on Thursday.  We had a great time on this cruise and are glad we have experienced Russia, despite several of our friends questioning why we would go to Russia given  the governments  behavior, think Vladimir Putin, on the international stage. While Russian politics can never be far from any discussion of all things Russian, we attempted to separate the political from the cultural and enjoyed learning about and experiencing the rich culture of this fascinating country.