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Published: June 14th 2010
ST PETERSBURG, THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION - (Aug/ Sept 2007)
- (Thursday 30th August to Monday 3rd September) - Thurs 30th Aug - Mon 3rd Sept - (St Petersburg) The more I read about Russia and learnt about the country, the more interested I became in it and the more places I wanted to visit. However, Russia is such a vast country and my time in the country was limited, so unfortunately on this occasion, I decided that I would restrict my journey to the western European part of the country. Siberia and the far north and east sounded absolutely fascinating albeit a long way away, so unfortunately, those places would have to be left to another time. Therefore, on my return to Moscow from the Golden Ring cities I decided to head straight up to St Petersburg.
From reading the LP, there seemed to be quite a few places to see in and around St Petersburg so as I had done in Moscow, I decided that I would base myself in St Petersburg and visit a few places surrounding the city which appeared to be relatively easy to get to from St Petersburg.
I arrived back in
Moscow at the Godzilla hostel from Suzdal late Monday evening. Now that I was experienced with trying but not succeeding in getting a train ticket myself at train stations, I decided that it would be far easier to make use of the hostel’s own travel service and to get a train ticket from them - which I don’t think was much more expensive than getting it yourself at the station in any event.
St Petersburg is around 700km north west of Moscow and there is an overnight train which sets off from Moscow around 10pm and arrives in St Petersburg around 5am the following morning. The hostel managed to get me a train ticket for Wednesday night.
After spending one last day in Moscow, on Wednesday evening I made my way to the train station (Leningradsky vokzal) via the metro which proved to be relatively straight forward. I had thought that if it was going to happen at all, then this would be the time when I had my big bag with me that I would get stopped by the police looking to pick on a tourist. However, fortunately this proved not to be the case and I
left Moscow without having any hint of trouble from the authorities in all my time there.
As I usually do, I’d given myself plenty of time to get to the station to allow for any unforeseen occurrences which may happen, which fortunately didn’t happen on this occasion. I therefore arrived at the station in plenty of time and had to wait around for a quite a while before my train was called.
The station hall where passengers waited for their trains was a large dimly lit room with a few plastic bench seats, the number of which was nowhere near enough to seat all the passengers and people in the hall. This lead to people and luggage being strewn all across the hall and you had to carefully step over and around people when wandering about. Every now and then an announcement would be made over the tannoy system and a message would appear on one of the screens after which there would either be a rush of people heading towards the entrance to the platform or alternatively a rush of people coming into the hall from one of the arriving trains.
The hall was lined with
little kiosks and bars and restaurants and I managed to get myself a beer and some snack food while I was waiting. As always when you don’t understand the language and are not fully confident that you know precisely what is going on, I was slightly worried that with every announcement they were calling my train. This lead me to constantly check my ticket and try to match the Cyrillic writing on my ticket with what was displayed on the screen.
However, with 30 minutes to go and with my worry about whether I’d missed the announcement of my train rising, my train was called and I along with 100’s of other people rushed down to the platform towards the train. If I remember correctly, I’d bought myself a ticket for an upper second class sleeping carriage which contained 4 beds and I can remember that I was on the bottom bunk. The carriage was full and I was accompanied by another guy around my age, a business man who looked to be in his mid to late 40’s (who told us he undertook the trip to St Petersburg on a regular basis for business purposes), and a girl
who was probably in her 20’s.
Immediately after boarding the train, the girl made her way onto the top bunk, covered herself in the blanket and sheets that were provided, and disappeared for the remainder of the journey and we didn’t see her again until we arrived in St Petersburg the following morning. The two guys could speak a smattering of English and we stayed up for a few hours trying to communicate with each other the best we could. Even though it was difficult to communicate, the atmosphere in the carriage was very relaxed and not at all like it can sometimes get when you are stuck in a confined space with strangers and you can’t speak each other’s language.
Around an hour into the journey, the food/ drinks trolley came around and the business man bought a few bottles of beer, some vodka, and some chocolate which he shared around. I tried to limit the amount that I drunk as I didn’t want to arrive in a strange city for the first time where I didn’t speak the language so early in the morning with a hangover! This proved to be a bit difficult however, because
"Chariot of Victory"
To celebrate Russia's victory over Napoleonthe business man kept offering beer and vodka to both of us and he wouldn’t accept no for an answer. However, I hope I managed to limit what I drunk without offending him too much. In any event, I managed to arrive in St Petersburg the following morning without a ‘hangover’!
We arrived in St Petersburg, I think, just after 5 o’clock in the morning. For the first time in such a long time, (certainly for the first time on this trip and probably since the last time I was in England about a year earlier), I felt cold! The coldness reminded me that after such a long time, I had just arrived back in northern Europe and that I was just about to embark on the final chapter of my journey back to the UK.
St Petersburg’s metro system opened shortly after the train arrived at St Petersburg’s Moskovsky Vokzal. I had already pre-booked a hostel on hostelworld.com, Cuba hostel, which had been recommended to me by Aled in Tajikistan all those months ago, so after a short wait waiting for the metro to open, I got a metro ticket and made my way to the hostel.
Fortunately, the metro was easy to use (I think there are only five lines). I managed to make myself understood at the ticket kiosk and got a ticket relatively easily. I then found the correct line easily enough which would take me to within a five minute walk of the hostel. Aled had told me that the hostel was quite hard to find but fortunately he had given me specific instructions on how to find it and what to look out for. The door to the hostel was apparently located next to a pub/ bar with a red post box outside it.
Armed with these instructions, I only walked past the hostel door once, which Aled had told me I would do, before I found it. The hostel itself was located on the 2nd floor of a large pre-Soviet apartment building. I had to buzz the hostel from the street. It was still early so it took some time for someone to answer the buzzer and let me in. Once inside the building, I made my way up the staircase to the hostel. The stairwell area was dark, dingy and un-kept and wasn’t exactly welcoming, but the hostel
itself was fine. It was nothing special but it was more than adequate for a few days.
Being early (probably around 7 - 8am by this time) I couldn’t check in but I was told I could help myself to free coffee and tea and make myself at home in the common room until the rooms had been cleaned, which was expected to be around 10am. After a night of ‘half-sleep’ on the train, I was tied but after I had had the chance to check in and have a shower, I felt invigorated and excited, and ready to have a look around the city.
St Petersburg is Russia’s second largest city and with a population of 4.6 million is Europe’s 7th biggest city, as well as according to Wikipedia, the most northern city with a population of over 1 million inhabitants in the world. The city of St Petersburg was the grand dream of Peter the Great and was founded in 1703 on swamp land that was captured from the Swedes during the ‘Northern’ Wars.
The city was built by conscripted serfs from all over Russia along with Swedish prisoners of war, many of whom died
of decease and exhaustion - so much so that the city is still known today as the ‘City Built on Bones’! St Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire between 1713-1918 after which due to the city's proximity to the border and the anti-Soviet armies massing nearby to destroy the newly formed Bolshevik government, the capital was transferred back to Moscow on March 12, 1918.
Between 1741 and 1825 during the reigns of Empress Elizabeth, Catherin the Great and Alexander I, a series of great palaces, government buildings and churches were commissioned and built which made the city into one of the finest cities in Europe. The city has been described as the ‘Venice of the North’ due to its location on the Baltic Sea and because of the many canals that have been built within the city.
However, for all its grandeur, after the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 and the industrialisation at this time, the flood of poor workers that headed into the city during this period lead to lots of squalor, decease and discontent, something which is said to have led to the city becoming the hub of the 1905 and
1917 Russian revolutions. In 1917, the February and October revolutions started in St Petersburg which resulted in the end of the Russian monarchy and bought the Bolsovieks and Vladimir Lenin to power.
During its history, the city has had its fair share of names. While originally called Saint Petersburg, with the start of WW1 the name Saint Petersburg was perceived to be too German and in 1914 the city was renamed Petrograd. Then on January 26 1924, three days after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. It remained Leningrad until 1991 when in a referendum, 54% of the city’s citizens voted to bring back the name St Petersburg, although the region around the city is still known as Leningradskaya oblast.
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, it took the Nazi’s only two and half months to reach Leningrad after which Nazi Germany besieged the city for a total of 872 days. More than a million civilians are said to have died from shelling, starvation and decease during the siege - this compares to the USA and UK who suffered about 700,000 dead between them in all of WW2.
The city hasn’t had the best
of times recently either. Apparently by the end of 1991, the deteriorating economy and the collapsing Soviet Union put the city on the verge of starvation and for the first time since WW2, food rationing was introduced and the city had to be helped out with humanitarian food aid from abroad.
However, the city has now recovered and has been heavily restored in recent years which has seen it grow as a major tourist destination. The city sprawls across and around the delta of the Neva River which is located at the end of the eastern most arm of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland. Despite its bitter recent history, there are still supposedly around 8000 architectural monuments in Saint Petersburg and the Lonely Planet describes the city as
‘one of the most glamorous cities in Russia’ and that the city is
‘like one gigantic museum showcase of 18th - 19th century palaces and mansions; mind boggling collection of museums which culminates in the breath taking Hermitage’.
The grandest of all the buildings and museums in St Petersburg is said to be the Winter Palace and the Hermitage museum. The hostel where I was staying was
pretty well located on the very edge of the centre of the city so it only took around 30 minutes to walk to the Palace from the hostel.
While the white Winter Palace is a very impressive building itself being lined with mint green, white and gold columns and with the building’s roof lined with rows of classical statues, the building’s setting in the square is equally impressive. The Palace is set within a large open square (Dvortsovaya Ploshchad (Palace Sq) in which the 47.5m Alexander column built in 1834 is located. The column is named after Alexander I and commemorates Russia’s 1812 victory over Napoleon. It was in this square that Tsarist troops fired on peaceful demonstrators in 1905 sparking the first Russian revolution of that year.
On its southern side, the square is bounded by a very grand, crescent shaped classical building through which an archway has been built which leads you into the square from the surrounding streets. This building was designed as a general staff building for the Russian army. The building is topped by a chariot of victory which is another monument to Russia’s victory over Napoleon.
On the opposite side, the
Winter Palace is built on the banks of the river which provides an impressive view when travelling along the river in one of the many boats/ ferrys that take tourists around the city’s river/ canals and Baltic shoreline.
The Winter Palace was commissioned in 1754 by Empress Elizabeth and remained an imperial home until 1917. As well as being very grand and impressive, the palace is also massive, comprising 1057 rooms and 117 staircases. The Palace contains a large part of the State Hermitage museum’s collection.
The State Hermitage museum itself has an enormous collection of art works (said to number over 3 million items). There is said to be around 20 times as much art not on display as is. Whilst the Winter Palace is by far the biggest building containing the museum’s collection, the museum itself consists of five linked buildings which include the Winter Palace, the Little Hermitage, the Old and New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre. There are also separate collections of the museum’s art work located elsewhere in the city.
The Hermitage’s collection is said to have really began with Catherine the Great who is said to have pulled off some stunning
art deals including famously exchanging one large portrait of herself for 15 Van Dykes from the collection of Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole.
The museum was first opened to the public in 1852 although it was only after the Bolshevik revolution that the size of the collection is said to have increased threefold as many valuable private collections were sized by the Soviet state. During the war, the entire collection was moved out of the city by train before the Nazis could arrive.
The tourist literature says that the highlights of the museum include: -
The ancient Egyptian collection; The Imperial State room and apartments; Florentine art from the 13th to 16th century; Venetian art from the 16th century; Art from Raphael and his disciples; Spanish art from the 16 to 18th century; Flemish art of the 17th century; Dutch art of the 17th century; Italian art from the 16 to 18th century; the Imperial families cathedral; and late 19th century and early 20th century European art.
As you can imagine, with the size of the museum and collection, I had been told that to do the museum justice, you needed to do a bit
of planning and to take in the contents of the museum over several visits. However, to be quite frank, after all this time on the road and continually visiting museums, I’d had my fill of museums, especially art museums. Call me a philistine if you want, but I have to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of art museums and after a while, to me, they do tend to blend into one! However, while I was in St Petersburg, I had to have a look around and I did - and it was all very impressive, and for a true art lover, it must be absolute heaven. I spent a few hours within the museum probably barely scratching the surface of it and there were indeed some incredible pieces of art in the collection, but after 3 or 4 hours, I’d really had had enough and I left.
I could have, and some would say, I should have gone back another day, but I didn’t. Sadly, and boringly as some people might say, I was more than happy just wandering around the city looking at all the fantastic architecture and visiting the odd small museum dedicated to contemporary
Russian/ Soviet history - something which is more my thing.
There are too many grand buildings, palaces, churches, and museums in St Petersburg to mention, but some of the ones that I particularly remember visiting included:
• St Isaac’s cathedral - which was built between 1818 and 1858 and which has a golden dome which dominates St Petersburg and can be seen from every view point around the city. The cathedral also has a very lavish interior and you can climb the 262 steps up to the colonnade around the drum of the dome, which I did, for fabulous views of the city;
• Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood - which is officially known as the Church of Resurrection which looks like a smaller version of St Basils in Moscow. The church was built between 1883 and 1907 reportedly on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was blown up in 1881. The Church was located reasonably close to my hostel so I came across it quite often and it was very impressive;
• The State Museum of the History of St Petersburg - which focuses on the blockade of St Petersburg by the Nazis
and which had some very impressive and mind provoking displays of the blockade; and
• The Museum of Political History - which is housed in a small old palace which was made into the Bolshevik’s headquarters in 1917, and where Lenin apparently often gave speeches from the balcony (If I remember correctly this museum was not that impressive).
On the other side of the river to where I was staying and to where most of the historical buildings that I have mentioned above are located, is where the original city of St Petersburg was started.
On this side of the river is where the Peter and Paul Fortress which dates from 1703 is located. The fortress is the oldest building in St Petersburg and was planned by Peter the Great as a defence against the Swedes. However, it apparently never saw any action and was used mainly up to 1917 as a political prison during which its famous residents included Dostoevsky, Gorgy, Trotsky and Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, who was executed for his part in the plot to kill Tsar Alexander III in 1887.
Within the fortress is a cathedral which can be seen throughout
the city due to its unmistakable 122m tall needle thin gilded spire. The cathedral has a magnificent baroque interior and is the last resting place of all of Russia’s pre-Revolutionary rules from Peter the Great.
I must admit that I was very underwhelmed when I visited the fortress and adjacent buildings/ cathedrals. This may have been because they just couldn’t compare with all the other fantastic and marvellous buildings that I had already seen around St Petersburg during the previous few days, or, more likely, it could have had more to do with the fact that I was getting a bit of ‘site seeing fatigue’!
Sat 1st Sept - (Petrodvorets) 29km west of St Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland is the Palace of Petrdvorets which is said to be arguably the most impressive of St Petersburg’s suburban palaces, of which there are many, and which is sometimes called the ‘
Russian Versailles’.
You can get there by bus easily from St Petersburg and visit the palace and get back to St Petersburg easily within the day. Once I’d found out where I had to catch the bus from, I set off from the hostel on the metro
fairly early in the day so as to make the most of my time. As far as I can remember, it was all fairly easy and once out of the metro, I found the bus with no trouble and the bus journey only took around 40 minutes.
The main palace building and its adjacent churches are all fairly impressive although the centrepiece of the palace is the Grand Cascade which consists of over 140 fountains, canals and statues. When I was there the Grand Cascade had only recently been reguilded and therefore looked a bit artificial, although I thought it still looked impressive nevertheless.
Apparently what is seen today at Petrodvorets is a largely reconstructed palace and grounds due to the fact that it was largely destroyed during WW2. While the palace was trashed by the Germans during the war, most of the damage is said to have been done by Soviet bombing raids between December 1941 and January 1942 because Stalin was determined to stop Hitler from hosting a New Year’s victory celebration within the palace!
I didn’t actually enter the palace and its adjacent buildings which were quite expensive to go inside. I instead made
do with just walking around the grounds admiring the architecture and the Grand Cascade and fountains, something which was more than adequate for me.
Being located overlooking the Gulf of Finland and with a strong wind blowing in from the sea bringing the occasional heavy rain shower, it was very cold and wet during my visit. However, I still managed to have a good look around for a couple of hours despite the fact that I had to occasionally dive under any cover I could find within the gardens when one of the frequent rain showers descended upon the palace.
After a couple of hours of looking around and getting wet in the rain, I decided to make my way back to St Petersburg. It took some time to find the correct bus stop to catch a bus back to the city although compared to some of the attempts I’d had of trying to find the correct transport to where I wanted to go during the course of this trip, it didn’t take too long and around an hour later I was back in St Petersburg.
Sun 2nd - Mon 3rd Sept - (St Petersburg) - I
can’t now remember much about what I did whilst I was in St Petersburg during the evenings. Some nights I would hang around the hostel chatting to a few people, or go to the pub next door to watch some football on the TV. However, one day I got chatting to an Australian girl who was staying in my dorm room and she said that she wanted to go to the Ballet and was looking for someone to go with. I’d never been to a ballet before, and it’s never really been anything that I have particularly wanted to see. However, this was St Petersburg, the birth place of Russian ballet, so I decided to go along.
The tickets were cheap. I think we got some tickets for about £5 each for the top balcony. I can’t now remember which theatre the performance was held at, but the ballet was being performed by the Bolshoi, but not I think, by their main troop. The ballet was ‘Snow White’ with music from Tchaikovsky, who is, although I’m not an expert in classical music, one of my favourite classical composers. The theatre was quite small but not quite full and there
wasn’t a proper orchestra playing but just recorded music. However, the ballet performance was absolutely fantastic!
I couldn’t keep my eyes off the dancers, especially the women ballet dancers in particular and wonder how on earth they could be so elegant, so flexible, and manage to stay on their feet and balance on their toes so gracefully. The main female dancer in particular was just absolutely unbelievable. - I was just hooked. And the music was fantastic also even though it was just piped in.
I must admit, and this really isn’t politically correct, but I just didn’t get it with the male dancers prancing around in their tights! To me, they were nowhere near as good, or as mesmerising as the women dancers. However, I suppose you need male ballet dancers as well as female dancers to make a ballet into the wonderful spectacle it was, and is!
Along with all the fabulous buildings and museums, St Petersburg also has lots of nice cafes and restaurants to hang around in and people watch at. The hostel where I was staying was located just off one of the main arterial roads leading from the city centre and
was lined with lots of café bars and restaurants. Unfortunately however, while it was mainly sunny while I was visiting St Petersburg, it was cold and you could feel the cold air blowing off the Baltic Sea which put a bit of a dampener on being able to sit outside one of the many cafes/ restaurants in the sun while letting the world go by. However, I tried, but once the sun started to go down towards the end of the afternoon/ early evening, I ended up sitting there, shivering, trying to stay out and enjoy my drink as long as possible.
Unfortunately, the cold really did make it feel like the end of summer and it reinforced the fact that my trip was approaching its end and that I would soon be back home in England!
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Heather
non-member comment
Wow, I LOVED your Russia post and photos! I've always wanted to go there but have yet to make it. I learned SO much from reading your post! My blog is looking for travel photos, reviews, commentaries, etc, to share. If you have the time, check it out at dirty-hippies.blogspot.com, or email me at dirtyhippiesblog@gmail.com. Continued fun with your limited time there, and good luck adjusting to life back home in England. I know how difficult that can be. Heather :)