On the morning of our first full day in saint Petersburg, we had reached the halfway point of our trip. Breakfast
was good – we met Sasha, and collected our passports, then did some laundry before we left the hotel.
The metro was busy as we fought our way on, and then took a trolley bus into the centre of town. This was Sasha’s
hometown, so he was conducting the tour. We started with the statue of Catherine the great.
Officially Catherine II of Russia, Catherine ruled the Russian Empire for 34 years from 1762 until her death in 1796, and is one of the most famous leaders of Russia’s history. She exhibited some traits of an enlightened despot, in that she was a patron of the arts, mediator in international affairs and provider of asylum following the suppression of Jesuits in most of Europe in 1773. However, she refused to contenance a constitution, suppressed religious dissent when it suited her and despite her concilliatory efforts in some foreign affairs, she also added 200,000 sq miles to Russian territory during her reign.
Catherine was succeeded by her son Paul I, who set about reclaiming land ans assets given away by his mother to her lovers during her reign. However, his reign did not last long and he was assasinated by a group of dismissed military officers after he alienated the nobility with attempts tp get them to adopt a code of chivilry. Clearly it didn’t work.
At the ballet theatre, we booked tickets for the evening’s performance of Giselle, figuring that a visit to St Petersburg couldn’t pass without seeing a ballet.
The walking tour continued, taking in the ballet school, the Admiralty, civil war memorial history and ethnography
museums, naval academy, and the St Peter and Paul cathedral. The cathedral was built as a fortress to protect the sity from an attack by the Sweedish dureing the Great Northern War, but was never used as such, and is now a museum. It contains the second tallest structure in saint Petersburg, after the TV tower (why must communist countries insist on building such ugly TV transmitters?). Sasha tells us that the city used to flood regularly, until a dam was installed in the Gulf of Finland.
Finally we come to the famous Church on Spilt blood, dedicated to Alexander II who was assassinated on that spot on 13th March 1881. The church was seriously damaged in world war II, but the restoration has made it look practically new. It is in fact not a real church and never has been, since it has not been resantified since its restoration and was never used as a place of worship, simply a memorial to the fallen tsar.
We then pass St Issac’s Cathedral, which is now also responsible for the management of the Church on Spilt Blood. St Issac’s was built over 40 years between 1818 and 1858, and has had an equally interesting history. Under the Soviet government, the building was abandoned, then turned into a museum of atheism. During World War II, the gold domes were painted grey to avoid attracting attention from enemy bombers, and most recently it has become a museum to it’s own heritage, with some services resuming in the side chapel and occasionally in the main body of the cathedral. It’s also worth noting that when it was built the gold domes were created using a pioneering new spray painting technique involving a gold-mercury mix. The mercury then evaporated leaving just gold, but the technique also left almost all the workers involved dead or seriously ill from mercury poisoning.
After the tour, Sasha left us and we went to get films developed and we finally found an internet cafe by getting GPS co-ordinates texted to us by a friend in London who googled one for us.
In the evening, we went to the ballet. There was more than a smattering of English voices in the crowd, so it seemed that a lot of the audience were tourists. The theatre was not large but was very grand, with a huge chandelier in the centre, and five levels of boxes around the sides. We were in the rear stalls.
Initially I was not very impressed – the costumes seemed garish, the dancing straightforward and the story rather overacted. But by the end of act I I was won over and act II was stunning, with the principle ballerina’s performance breathtaking. At the end there was a rather awkwardly long standing ovation, but overall we felt it was well worth the £12 we paid for stalls seats (probably around £70 in London).
When we got back to the Hotel the laundry wasn’t back yet and housekeeping hadn’t even made the beds, but we figured we’d have a moan tomorrow.