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Published: January 2nd 2008
Chandelier
The HermitageThe radio on the train to St Petersburg played "Rasputin", an apposite song given my next destination but also a reminder that a worryingly large chunk of my knowledge of Russian history came from Boney M lyrics. I quickly turned to the appropriate section of the TSH, keen to learn something about the man and the times he lived in other than that "to Moscow chicks he was such a lovely dear".
St Petersburg's metro still runs on a quaint token system like Boston's, but the imposing safety doors between the train and the platform make it difficult for the novice user to figure out which station they're at. I took my guidebook's advice to simply count the stops.
Emerging onto Nevsky Prospekt (the city's main artery), I was immediately reminded of London by the abundance of classical and neo-classical architecture lining the road. Christmas lights, honking traffic, and crowds of shoppers and people leaving work spelled "Oxford Street" in my head.
My hostel was another strange one to add to the collection. A grotty and smelly staircase led up to a decent apartment and my room was only a little more than half the cost of what
I'd paid in Moscow. Again, the other occupants weren't quite what I was hoping for - my 2nd night there, a group went out on a drinking bender, returning noisily at 3:30AM and vomiting in the kitchen sink and one of the toilets without bothering to clean it up. They were replaced by what appeared to be a party of Peruvian refugees, who permanently occupied the kitchen/common room and hadn't figured out that sound travels through walls so the 5:30AM chats they liked having in their bedroom (next to mine) meant I didn't need an alarm clock.
St Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century. He hated Moscow, both because of having seen various of his family members murdered there and also because he deemed it backward and afraid of modernisation, and soon moved the capital to his new city. Even today, it's often referred to as the Northern Capital. Peter was both brilliant and despotic. On becoming tsar, he immediately embarked on an incognito grand tour of Europe, visiting heads of state and the brightest minds of the continent as well as working in a Dutch shipyard. His exposure to ideas
Ceiling
The Winter Palace from all over Europe was to greatly influence his style of ruling as well as the development of St Petersburg. Though his accomplishments were many, his reign was characterised by brutality and a curtailment of civil liberties. Serfs were gathered from hundreds of kilometres away to build his new capital, with dire working conditions leading to a high mortality rate. He banned beards as they had fallen out of fashion in Western Europe at the time, but then relented and imposed a beard tax instead. He overcame a shortage of stonemasons available to work on his new capital by banning building in stone anywhere else in the country.
As a result of the efforts of Peter and his successors, St Petersburg is a superb tourist city, boasting architecture and artistic centres that can hold their own with anywhere else in the world. The most famous attraction is the museum/art gallery housed in the Winter Palace and its better-known annex the Hermitage. The setting would itself be spectacular even without its rooms, halls, and stairways being filled with art and artefacts from all over the world. The collection was started by Catherine the Great and was swelled by gifts from
With knobs on
Church of the Resurrection detail both Russians and foreigners seeking favour or promotions from the royal court. After the revolution it received a boost via "voluntary" donations from the aristocracy's private collections. There are so many pieces that even if you only spent a minute looking at each one it would take you 5 years to see the lot (not that they're all on display at once). Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo are all represented, though the French Impressionist gallery is the most popular. I'm not a great museum fiend but I still spent about 5 hours there, though the sheer size of the place mitigates against a quick run-through.
Though the temperature was above freezing, there was often a chill wind blowing in from the north that quickened one's step and made one's eyes water. There were large expanses of buckled ice on the river Neva though the central channel was still flowing. The hostel reception had told me that December wasn't a good month for sun and one sunset was all I saw of it in a week. With these lighting conditions and the network of trolley bus wires criss-crossing the city, photography was a challenge that I pretty much
Train lunch-box
My ticket back from St P to Moscow was just over half the cost of the one from Moscow to St P, with the only apparent difference being that I didn't get one of these on the return journey. gave up on.
There are numerous religious buildings dotted around the city, with some of the most notable being St Isaac's Cathedral (a bronze-domed affair that was originally the main church of the Russian empire but now houses a museum and is rarely used for services), Kazan Cathedral (modelled on St Peter's in Rome), the Church of the Resurrection (in Old Russian style, like St Basil's in Moscow), and the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral (boasting an enormous gold spire topped with an angel, and containing the remains of the majority of the tsars, including Nicholas II and the rest of the royal family killed in Yekaterinburg after the revolution).
There's a similar number of museums dealing in subjects across the spectrum from mundane to arcane. I had high hopes for the Arctic and Antarctic Museum but, like all other museums I've seen in Russia, the experience was disappointingly incomplete due to the tourist-unfriendly habit of labelling 99% of things in Russian only. This is especially irritating as many places have dual pricing with foreigners paying more - though the laughable reason given for this is that foreigners are paying the true price whereas Russians are subsidised. However
Detail
Church of the Resurrection the photo of a surgeon performing an appendectomy on himself in an Antarctic base needed little explanation. I was initially surprised to see that there was a Space Museum in the Saints Peter and Paul Fortress - not the first place I would have expected to find one - but it turned out that rocket research had been conducted there from which the Russian space program eventually emerged.
The noon cannon fired from the ramparts of the fortress proved effective at setting off car alarms as well as waking the many dozing babushkas guarding the galleries of the museums within its walls.
However my favourite cultural experience was at a bar in the east of the city that muscled its way past competitors in San Francisco, Barcelona, and Rhodes to become the new centre of my musical universe. I'd headed there on a Saturday evening hoping to catch some Premiership football on their big screen but a combination of poor navigation and forgetting there's only a 3 hour time difference between here and GMT meant I arrived too late for any sporting action. This was not a problem. 7 hours later, 7 hours of the most perfect music
known to man later, I was being handed my bill and a polite request to leave because they were about to close. Anyone who knows me will already be rolling their eyes as they imagine the components of the DJ's set list. If music is the sole criterion for where I next live, then look out for me in St Petersburg some time in 2009.
There seems to be an interesting view of sleaze in Russia, which I've noticed across the country. Bars that are not strip clubs per se will offer strip shows on certain nights of the week. Many places, including my St Petersburg paradise, had scantily-clad dancing girls who were neither good enough at dancing nor being scantily-clad to explain their purpose. Strip joints will appear in the nightclub listings as though they were indistinguishable from somewhere where YOU can dance to music. Even massage parlours, which are a front in many countries, don't seem to bother hiding their real purpose by offering functions that "are not medical services for which a licence is required". One mentioned that it had "simplified entrance for foreigners", which sounded open to misinterpretation.
I only saw a fraction of
Detail
Church of the Resurrection what St Petersburg had to offer and fully intend returning at a time of the year when the weather is more conducive to photography. There's also a wealth of sites outside of the city that I had insufficient time to visit, including Peterhof, another of Peter the Great's constructions that was inspired by Versailles. But my impending flight back to the UK necessitated a return to cold and snowy Moscow.
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