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"Ships of every flag shall come, by waters they have never swum - and we shall revel, freely ranging"Pushkin - The Bronze Horseman
Despite our high expectations, StP did not disappoint. We arrived early and our first excursion was a bus tour around the city. PP and CS had originally signed up for the 'up close' option, hoping it would mirror the walking tour arrangement in Moscow but we found on the day that that option in St P did not include a visit to the Peter and Paul Fort. We checked with Kathrin who laughingly acknowledged that we would not be dragged screaming to the walking bus if we had now changed our minds. We settled into Bus A as usual, on that basis. It seemed that most of the others who had made the same draw had discovered the same fact, since the walking tour bus ended up virtually empty and the other buses over-loaded. With characteristic grace and efficiency the issue was resolved happily and we were soon underway. Being 'underway' in a Russian city vehicle is a relative term. The boat dock is some way up river from the city centre and despite travelling
on the three lanes each way road along the embankment we were soon at a standstill in grid-locked traffic.
We finally made it across the Petra Okhtinski Bridge and turned into the area where Smolny Institute is located. Ten minute photo stop among a barrage of other buses double and triple parked gave the chance to briefly glimpse the palace where Cat II set up her school for women and the associated Church with its bells carefully gated on the grounds. Then off again. Micha explained that today was City Day - a public holiday and occasion for closing off a number of the main streets. This too, would hamper our progress further. We had a similar quick stop in Nicholas I's square where the St Isaac's Cathedral dominates and then crossed the Neva and made for the fort. That part of the trip was a useful way to orient ourselves to the city for closer inspection later.
The fortress is as large and imposing as one would expect a major work of Pete the Great to be, and again the photos say more than words.
"A giant built it lacking
stones, he paved the swamps with human bones." Mikhail Dmitriev
It is the original citadel of the city and its oldest building, being started in 1706. Ironically its main use has been as a prison as it has never been called upon to act as a bulwark against the Swedes, its main original purpose, because Peter defeated them before it was finished.
We went inside the Cathedral and saw the 'tombs' of the Romanovs including those of the reinterred remains of the last family, verified by DNA evidence as the real thing. Micha explained that those graves with plaques in a separate room off the main Cathedral space, are not accepted by the Church as provably the remains of Nicholas II and his wife and brood (including Anastasia, by the way) despite generally regarded, unassailable DNA evidence.
The stone sarcophagi do not, apparently, hold the corpses which are in fact buried in the ground under them according to Micha, based on the Orthodox principle that dust should return directly to dust. Micha suggested this accounted for why the graves survived the Bolsheviks, because they proved just too hard to dig up?
CS had read somewhere that Alex I's grave had been opened and found empty, prompting further fuel for the legend that he did not die in the south in Teganrog but went to Siberia to be a monk, so that snippet may be instead, a misunderstanding of the term 'grave'! It does not resolve the original premise, however.
We also saw the grave of Alex III's Danish wife, Maria Fiodorovna, who escaped the Civil War, died in Denmark in 1928 but requested in her will to be buried with her husband and family - a request that the Russian government recently acceded to.
In the afternoon we travelled by bus to Pushkin, a suburb town outside St P which was once called Tsarskoye Selo (Zsar's village) where the palace and park of that name are located. Here we were assailed by further opulence of the early Romonovs. Peter I gave it to his beloved Catherine and she had it developed into a country retreat for her oddly reclusive husband. Daughter Elizabeth engaged her favourite architect, Rastrelli to enlarge the main building into what she called the Catherine Palace, entreating him to 'guild everything' an
instruction he took energetically to heart, here and in all the other buildings he had anything to do with. In fact the Palace is a virtual reconstruction of the original which was largely destroyed by the Germans during WWII. The centrepiece to marvel at here is the so-called Amber Room, also reconstructed to look like the original which was looted by the Nazis and never recovered. Photographs are not permitted in this room.
The gardens are arranged on the French classic geometric pattern but with a distinctly Russian flavour. They are not so highly manicured as their prototypes. We also stopped by the statue of Pushkin after whom the town is named.
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