Day 8 (14 Sep) Pushkin - Catherine Palace

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Welcome to the incredible Catherine Palace and Park in Pushkin, about 25 km southeast of St Petersburg. This was clearly one of the most impressive sightseeing locations on our Russian tour.



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Another day of travelling to another palace! This time to Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin). The town was founded in 1711 as a royal residence. It was given the status of a town in 1808. The first railway in Russia was opened in 1837 connecting Tsarskoye Selo to St. Petersburg. After the October Revolution the town was renamed Detskoye Selo (Children's Village). Then in 1937 it was renamed Pushkin to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the popular Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin.



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As we drove in to the village we stopped at the Jewish memorial to commemorate those Jews shot by the Nazis. The inscription comes from Psalm 79 and translated read " they spilled their blood like water and nobody was there to bury them." The statue is interesting it is a person sitting bent over like a person praying the "Tachanun" prayer (a private prayer in the morning service - a plea to G-d). Jews served in the Russian army against the Nazis and they too are mentioned on the inscriptions.



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Then a walk to the entrance to the palace. We were greeted by a band amusing the visitors. And then into the grounds of the Catherine Palace, originally named for Catherine I who got the initial small palace building and grounds from her husband Peter the Great. Later tsars enlarged it to the biggest and most lavish summer palace in Russia. It was the favourite palace of Catherine the Great (Empress Catherine II) who was last to improve it. When tsar Nicholas II resigned in 1917 he wished to stay at Catherine Palace but was sent to Siberia and killed there.



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This is another design by Rustrelli the architect. We entered into the lobby and this time we had brown shoe covers with which to polish the floors.



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Again the rooms were lavish, ornate, and breathtakingly extravagant. During the war the palace burned down and is still being restored. One pair of cherubs which are dark in colour are those which survived the fire. The chandeliers are gold leaf on wood and 11 kilos of gold leaf was used on one chandelier. The ceilings are painted with copies of the original paintings. Then we walked through a 900 foot corridor of gold to the Amber Room. The Amber Room is as the name implies a room completely decorated with Amber mined locally. The original amber was stolen by the Nazis and taken to Kalingrad (Koningsburg). What happened to it afterwards is anybody's guess.



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The layout of the palace is similar to the other palaces we saw on this trip but perhaps one of the things which stands out in this palace is the use of Russian quarried stones. For example the paper weights used by Alexander 1 were made of malachite. However, marble was not used for the pillars - the pillars were painted to resemble marble partly because plaster is much warmer than marble. There is so much too see, including period furnishings, dinner sets, etc that it is impossible to describe here.



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Not only is it difficult to convey the palace and grounds in words, even displaying a representative set of photographs presents a challenge. Don took nearly 150 pictures that day. After weeding through them about half are posted in this blog entry. These include large numbers of both interior and exterior shots. The top pictures interspersed with this blog text and immediately below it on the first page show some highlights selected by Don and more or less related to the text. Beneath those are many more in sequence from outside the main palace buildings to inside them and then all around the garden and its lake.



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Outside the palace the group (including Don) walked in the gardens and I (Lesley) sat and enjoyed the sunshine on a bench beside a small cottage.



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Catherine Park is the official name (in English) of the collected set of gardens and the lake they surround. In addition to the rivers, canals, floral gardens, etc there are numerous interesting sights. These include a marble bridge styled by an Italian architect, a bathhouse which looks like a mosque, a fountain illustrating the tale of the milkmaid who spilled the milk jug that she had dreamed to make her wealthy, a pyramid, and many more. Catherine the Great walked her dogs in the long lanes around the lake. Different areas are styled as an English garden, a French garden, etc. Just as the palace interior attempts to copy the best of every European building interior but with more glitz than any original, so the park encompasses features from all over. This is not to say it is merely a copy, because the assembled effect is truly original and overwhelming.



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We heard stories about many of the features in Catherine Park as we walked around the lake. The marble bridge was designed to resemble a picturesque bridge in Italy, by an architect from that country. The building shaped and decorated outside like a mosque is a bathhouse, since the tsar who commissioned that structure wanted "something useful, no other than a monument nor statue" to commemorate his victory over the Turks. The fountain with the milkmaid recalls the allegory of the maid who was carrying a jug of milk to market and daydreaming of how she would parlay it into significant wealth - sell the milk and buy a chicken, sell the eggs and buy more chickens, sell the chickens and buy a goat, sell the goat and buy a cow, etc - but she stumbled and dropped the jug dashing her hopes and plans. And the pyramid, well why not? - Egyptian artefacts like the Sphinx were considered mysterious, so this seemed a suitable place to hide.



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When the group met up we went into what had been a tiny summer cottage to listen to an acapella quintet singing a Russian folk song. Amazing! We all sat by the gardens and ate our packed lunches. Then onto the bus and back to St Petersburg.



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Then back to the hotel to change into our posh party clothes as we were off to the ballet to see Giselle at the Mikhailovsky theatre. The theatre itself is a work of art. The production was beautifully performed but the corps de ballet was dreadfully out of synch.





Coming back to the hotel after the ballet we had an interesting experience. There were four of us, Hagit, Penina, Don and myself. We had been told that the fare back to the hotel was 500 roubles. When we asked the price one taxi driver told us 1000 roubles so we walked away. Another driver came up to us and agreed to take us for 500 roubles. When asked where we were from we told him Israel. Well, he was glowing in his praise. He has friends who live there. I tried pushing to see if he was one of the Hidden Ones but he wasn't. He also had some very interesting things to say about Mr President Putin. Not very positive things either. There seem to be two opinions of Mr P - almost a secret love affair with him or absolute dislike. I think that we have to get into the Russian mindset before passing judgement. During the time of the tsars there was wealth or poverty and little in between. During the soviet era of the 60s until glasnost the majority of 'ordinary' people seemed able to live a reasonable life, although others were treated mercilessly. The older Russians found the western way of life difficult to come to terms with. They were comfortable. Putin seems to be emphasising that a return to the former way of life is good. People see the wealth of the oligarchs and assume that wealth = corruption. But as Orwell once wrote "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others." The wealth will be distributed to the powerful, an example will be made of the capitalistic wealthy, and they who have no power will still have nothing. A difficult dilemma.



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Note: SCROLL DOWN to see more many more pictures than fit around the text. This blog entry is deliberately spaced out to maximise the number of embedded photographs. Furthermore the current web version of this Travel Blog site apparently requires selecting 'Next' buttons to display most of the 72 photos attached here. But first Scroll Down to see the initial batch of pictures and then continue to the additional pages.

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