A cooking lesson in Suzdal

Any time that you arrive in a town at 5.35am you know that it is going to be a long day. When the day ends with 10 shots of vodka, you can be pretty sure that the next day will be even longer. We took an overnight train (third class once again) from St Pete, through Moscow to Vladimir. We got in to Vladimir at 4.55am and took a van to Suzdal, one of the towns in the Golden Ring. Suzdal was the first capital of Russia, before Moscow was even founded. In fact, a prince of Suzdal was the founder of Moscow. While tiny at 9000 residents and almost completely undeveloped and focused on farming and tourism, it is filled with churches and monasteries.

All of this is quite fascinating, but when you haven’t slept a wink all night, all I wanted to do was sleep and since it was cold, windy and raining, there was no way that I was doing anything after breakfast except sleep. Breakfast was, in fact, at the house of a local lady, where Lenina and her 8 month pregnant daughter served us a delicious spread of blini, breakfast quiche and all the fixin’s. Even better, we were going to eat there that night and I had been able to organize to go over early and help prepare the meal and hopefully pick up some insight in how to cook Russian food.

After a wonderful nap, I headed out in to the drizzle and checked out some of the 36 churches and 8 monasteries/convents, which are in various states of (dis)repair. My first stop was the Intercession Convent and Cathedral. The outer walls of the convent look as though they will come down in the next strong wind, but inside it has been immaculately maintained, with gorgeous flower beds, by the 20 odd nuns that still live there. As a side note, the only time that I have ever been honked at crossing the street in Russia was by 5 nuns in a beaten up Lada coming out of this convent.

The interesting thing that I learned in Suzdal is that since churches are so expensive to heat, many churches have three buildings, a summer church (which went up first) and then a smaller winter church and bell tower, which is cheap to run. Don’t think this is a big issue in Australia.

One other cool thing about Suzdal is that since it was so rich, it had many very ornate houses, which while not especially large, have survived since the 16th and 17th centuries and are now protected by the state. Moreover, these historic houses are typically lovingly maintained and have beautiful flower gardens out front.

In the late afternoon we had a walking tour of several sites, including the biggest monastery, the Kremlin and a wooden museum. The large, red walled Monastery of the Deposition is now a museum as the monks were kicked out by the Communists and the place was used by the KGB, first for political prisoners and then WWI POWs. The coolest thing, I thought, about the place was the amazing vegetable and healing herb garden. The monks were renowned as healers back in the day and they still keep the garden in perfect shape and in the late summer bloom, everything was ripe and just begging to be eaten (relax I just tried some purple basil and some thyme).

The other interesting artifact is the church there predates the common usage of the roman numerical system in Russia and so the clock face has Cyrillic letters on it rather than numbers. The church has also been very well restored, with parts of four different layers of painting and fresco been uncovered. We were also very lucky to have four local guys come in while we were there and sing hymns in very pure voices.

The rain kept drizzling down on us as we soldiered on, on the longest walking tour we have done. It was supposed to be over in 2 hours and after that time we had yet to arrive at the second of the three major sites, the Kremlin. When we finally got there, we discovered that all that remains of the original fortifications is an earthen rampart, as the town never had stone or brick walls. Inside, there was a very nice church (from the outside, we couldn’t go in) and an interesting museum that had a funky old map that only showed a few parts of Australia (they hadn’t gotten to the east coast yet).

I was due at Lenina’s in 10 minutes, which meant that I couldn’t stay for more than 2 minutes at what seemed a very interesting open air Museum of Wooden Architecture and Peasant Life. When Suzdal and the other Golden Ring towns were formed, most of the buildings were wooden and about 10 years ago the government decided to relocate some of the surviving buildings to one place to enable easier preservation. There are two churches, several houses and a blacksmith, all of which are fairly ornate and I wish that I had more time there.

The walk back to Lenina’s house was longer than I remembered and I ended up being 15 minutes late and was promptly scolded like I was back in primary school and I was late home for dinner, though the roses that I brought as a gift helped soften the scolding. It is funny that even though Lenina spoke only in Russian, I knew exactly what she was saying. She then bundled me into her son’s house slippers (all Russians take their shoes off when entering the house)and taken into the kitchen, where pretty much all the cooking had already been done. The chicken in milk and garlic was in the oven and the local river fish in butter was already in rammikins.

So pretty much all this left was to drink vodka and talk. And this we did in spades. Lenina speaks about two words of English and I speak about two words of Russian, but even for that we had a great talk. We also wandered around her garden, where everything was ripe for picking. She showed me the new building that she was erecting out the back, which was a banya (combination bathhouse and sauna) with an upstairs bedroom. I was shown the wedding album from her son and daughter-in-law, which was quite cool. It turns out that her son is the manager of the local bank and so will likely end up being one of the most important men in town. And like me, her mother had taught her how to cook.

I was also trusted with some critical parts of the cooking: I stirred the mayonnaise into the potato salad, I took the chicken out of the oven and put in the fish and I got to cut the lemon into slices to be used as a chaser to the vodka shots. So I am told, after doing a shot, you suck on the lemon, which has pepper sprinkled on it and it is supposed to stop a hangover. I guess that this would work, but since I had done seven shots before everyone got there for dinner 90 minutes later, I cannot be sure.

Dinner was delicious, with more shots being passed around and merriment had by all. At the end of the evening, after big hugs all round, I managed to safely walk the two kilometers home. I am pretty sure that if I had have gone to bed at this point, all would have been well. However, we cracked out the mead, for which Suzdal is famous, and everyone had a sample. The first one was 5% alcohol and the second 8%, with the lower proof version being much tastier. Even at this point, I probably would have been OK, but then Pat cracked out a half bottle of vodka that he wanted to finish before leaving town, so it was another shot before bed, and that was killed me.

Let’s just leave it that the bus ride to Moscow in the morning was not pleasant.

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Part of trip: The Big One

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