More Pictures

1873 Renoir - Child with a Whip c1885.  One of Diana's favorites.

1723 A German built desk in the White Hall.  This is the least ornate room in the winter Palace.  It's carved and decorated but all in the same shade of white.

1731 The Red Pilaster Room.  As you can see there's no absence of gold and the parquet floor is beautiful.

1726 Obviously the Gold Room, again in the Winter Palace not in the Gold Rooms vault.  This is the most overwhelmingly decorated room in the palace but too small to get a good perspective for a photo.

Really sir, you'll have to be more specific. To which Hermitage do you refer?

1679  The Winter Palace of the Hermitage, the former residence of the Tsars and entrance to the museum.

1703  The Imperial Throne Room.  A large space and somewhat understated by palace standards.

1827  The Lute Player by Caravaggio from 1596.  One of three lute players he painted although I don't think the one in England is authentic.

1908 The Small Hermitage in green and the Old Hermitage in yellow.

The Sythian gold comb from the Gold Rooms, not to be confused with the Gold Room in the Winter Palace.

The Kolt also from the Gold Rooms, Garnets and gold

 

May 26 – Saint Petersburg, Russia.  Lake Lagoda is big enough that it can become very rough but usually only in early spring or late fall.  After crossing the lake we will enter the Neva River which flows through Saint Petersburg.  Our dock will be about 45 minutes from central St. Petersburg.  In Russia as in SoCal, you don't day distance in miles or kilometers, you use time.  Traffic is not as bad here as it is in Moscow, but it's still terrible on some streets especially during commuting hours. 

 

Our dock is right after you go under a very new suspension bridge of what I call the harp design.  The suspension wires fan out from the bridge towers like the strings of a harp rather than vertically down from a main cable between the towers.  It's a very aesthetically pleasing design and has a very modern look.  They have them all over the world now.

 

Today is going to be a long day.  First we booked an extensive tour of the Hermitage Museum that also includes a visit to the Storage.  The museum is like the Smithsonian in DC or the Getty in LA, only has exhibition space for a small percentage of its artifacts.  Many of the exhibits not on display are in the Storage, a very secure facility in the St. Petersburg suburbs.  This facility is only open to visitors by private arrangement and Viking has procured some of that space for their passengers.  It's the only optional tour you could sign up for before getting on the ship.  In fact, they recommended that you do as often there's no space available to book after boarding.  That's the case on this cruise.  If it wasn't booked from home, it's not available.  Next we have a ballet to go to this evening.  We're going to see Swan Lake at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Dance.  The Hermitage and Storage is from 8:45AM to 5PM and the ballet is from 6:45PM to 11:15PM.  That's a long tour day.

 

Like the Smithsonian, the Hermitage is located in several buildings three of which are on the street that runs along the southern bank of the Neva River and the fourth is behind one of the three.  The Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage and New Hermitage are now connected with cross overs and are essentially one huge building from the inside.  The façades have maintained their separate identity on the outside by using different colors of paint.  The Winter Palace, easily the largest of the four is aqua, The Small Hermitage is green.  The Old Hermitage is Yellow.  The New Hermitage is behind the Old Hermitage and since I never saw it from the outside, I don't know what color it is.

 

The entrance to the museum is in the Winter Palace the main residence of the Russian Tsars.  It's a main staircase designed for one purpose, to impress the visitor.  Whether in the Tsar's times or now it does not fail to do just that.  It's dual grand staircase leading up to the second floor, which only occupies half of the room is grand indeed.  It's a masterpiece of white marble and gold for the first story and a half topped off with a perspective architectural painting with a huge picture at the center.  The walls curve inward at the top toward the center of the room and the perspective painting makes it look like they rise vertically again for about 5 feet and terminate with the huge painting.  In fact, the perspective painting and the large central picture are on a flat surface.  It just looks like the ceiling rises an additional five feet.

 

The painting is of the Last Judgment, Gabriel is blowing his horn and some people are going up and others are going down.  It's probably not all that surprising that Mary, Queen of Heaven looks a lot like Catherine the Great.  Catherine founded the Hermitage collection in 1764 making the museum one of the world's oldest as well as one of the world's largest.  She had the Small Hermitage built to house it but it soon outgrew that building and the Old Hermitage was built in 1787.  The museum now owns over 3,000,000 items the majority of which the public has never seen. 

 

The highlight of the museum for me was seeing another Caravaggio, The Lute Player c1596.  Caravaggio painted a lute player three times making the year it was produced important.  Two of them have flowers to the left of the painting, the one here in the Hermitage and one in Badminton, England.  The one in England is disputed and I personally believe it is not an original but a copy.  The provenance of the one in the Hermitage is undisputed.  When we were in New York I mentioned seeing the other The Lute Player at the Met in New York City.  The compositions are much the same but the Met version has no flowers, there's a musical instrument that looks a lot like a zither in their place.  I can really go on and on about Caravaggio, I am unabashedly a fan.  However I'm not sure I would have like to know him, he was a bit of a rascal, which ended up getting him killed.

 

Of course the Winter Palace rooms are all uniquely decorated and amazing.  This part of the museum is preserved as a reminder of how the Tsars lived when in Saint Petersburg.  The Portrait Gallery, is almost entirely wallpapered in original oil portraits separated only by red cloth and gilded frames.  The Throne Room is huge, again white marble and gold with an intricate parquet floor and 6 huge golden chandeliers each with well over 100 candles.  Many of the rooms are known by the color of the pilasters, red, blue, green, gold, etc.  Each is opulently decorated and has elegant, if not overdone, furnishings.  These were the private rooms of the Tsar and the royal family as well as the state rooms used for ceremonies and rituals.

 

At one point we had to interrupt our trip through the Winter Palace to make out appointed appearance to the Gold Rooms.  The Gold Rooms are a vault where very old and valuable treasures are kept.  Unfortunately they do not allow pictures inside the vault.  It holds some of the oldest artifacts in the entire collection.  One of my favorites was a Comb with a Scythians in Battle carved into it from the 5^th century BC.  I was very pleased to see that the Hermitage has not yet gotten around to the new and politically correct term BCE (Before the Common Era) rather than BC (Before Christ).  Another was a kolt, temple ornament, from an ancient village in Volograd Russia.  It's made of gold and has garnets set in it. 

 

Once we crossed over the passage to the Small Hermitage the rooms were much more museum like with little furniture, not so elegantly decorated and lots more art.  They have some great impressionist paintings by Renoir (In the Garden c1885, Woman on a Stair c1876, Child with a Whip c1885), Van Gogh (Thatched Cottages c1890, Landscape with House and Ploughman c1889) and Monet (An early one The Grand Quay at Havre).  They have a few paintings by Cézanne, Pissarro, Boudin and Seurat but they are not their best work.  Most of them seem to have been painted before they hit their stride.  Although Boulevard Montmartre, Sunny Afternoon c1897 is very good.  They had a few by Gauguin, but I have to be honest, I've never cared for him much even at his best.

 

They also have a good collection of the Old Masters, El Greco, Valazquez, Rembrandt, Da Vinci (Madonna And Child), Titian and Raffaello (The Madonna and Child c1520). 

 

At about 1PM we left the Hermitage to go to the Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya.  The guides just call it Storage.  This is the attic of the Hermitage.  The first order of business was lunch.  They served us a small cabbage salad, borsht and veal stroganoff all accompanied by some very good Russian dark bread.  Yummy!!

 

It's not only a facility for storing thing, although it certainly is that.  Things that are very valuable or in need of cleaning, preservation or restoration are also brought here.  In this case preservation is used as a term of art.  When faced with an artifact that is damaged the institution has three choices, leave it alone, clean it, preserve it or restore it.  Various curators and experts have differing opinions but each is a viable choice in certain circumstances.

 

For example, let's say a museum has a pair of long-johns worn by a famous person of history and wants to display it.  They are woolen so over time they have become damaged, moths, tears, etc.  Wool being organic is subject to all sorts of problems that will damage it further so leaving it alone is probably not a good idea.  Some experts feel that restoration destroys the historic value of an artifact because you no longer have the real object, things have been added, repairs to rips, reweaving moth holes, etc.  If you only clean them they are still subject to more damage.  Preservation would be a good answer for these long-johns.  What they'd do is permeate the wool with agents to prevent further damage while leaving the holes and tears along.  If done correctly it won't change the look of the article either. 

 

Storage is the place where the Hermitage makes and then carries out the plan for each article in their inventory.  Many things are restored as they make a much better display.  Paintings and the like are often cleaned and many are also restored because previous ill-advised 'restorations or cleanings' have in fact damaged them more.  To correct these mistakes a modern restoration is undertaken.  I just hope that some future curator doesn't view this modern process as a big mistake.

 

No pictures allowed inside the buildings.  We have a very small group, about 16.  We are accompanied by our guide, a Storage guide and bringing up the rear a rather large security officer.  The Storage guide unlocks the doors to each room with her electronic key, we all enter and the guard closes the door behind us and generally hovers around at the rear of the group.

 

They have those shelves and racks on rollers.  You spin a handle on the end of the rack to move it aside to allow you to enter the row you want.  If your target is in the middle and the open row is at one end you have to roll each set of shelves aside to get to the next one and so on until you get to where you need to be.  It's a great system as you double your useable space by eliminating all but one aisle and you just have to move the shelves to get that aisle between the shelves you need to use.  It's useful in the painting and print section as you can get 10 times the storage because the eliminated aisles are much wider than the stands the paintings hang from.

 

Other rooms are more traditional storage with furniture and large decorational objects stored separately in rows.  One difference is that they've built risers to make each row higher that the ones right by the aisles so you can more easily see what's in the more distant rows.

 

Everything here is climate controlled and the Hermitage proper is not.  Often they will bring objects to Storage to get them into an environment that will allow them to dry out or remoisturize as the case may be.  The Hermitage is heated and that probably takes a toll on wooden objects over the long Russian winter.

 

When Saint Petersburg was threatened by the Germans in WWII, many valuable artifacts were packed up and sent out of town to be hidden.  They couldn't take all the furniture or china and things like that so they packed up one of each thing to use as a model for recreation if needed.  Based on the photos I've seen of how the Germans left the building of these palaces.  Really bad.

 

The last room was full of carriages, sleighs and other conveyances.  The grand masterpiece, Catherine the Great's carriage was the absolute definition of a royal vehicle.  They don't get any grander than that.

 

Last time I was here I didn't see the Gold Rooms or the Storage both very worthwile additions. 

 

We had to get back to the ship for dinner because we are going to the ballet this evening.  We're seeing Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky c1876.  I've seen this ballet before so I know the story and the music a bit.  My favorite melding of music and dance is in it.  It's the Dance of the Little Swans where 4 ballerinas hold hands with each other across their bodies and dance the entire piece that way.  If you want to see it follow this link:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQd1L_j-6A

 

The Big Swan's Dance that follows it is not bad either but the combination of music and dance steps of the Little Swans is my favorite

 

We saw the production at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory of Dance and it was very enjoyable.  I don't know enough about ballet to form an opinion about the technical merit of the dancers but the best dancer for me was the Joker.  He's one of those performers that will never get a leading part because he's not tall enough and he's too stocky to provide the elegant line needed with a ballerina but he's a powerful and graceful dancer so he'll get a lot of 'character' parts.  Everyone else seemed to enjoy it as well.

 

Got back to the ship at Midnight and we have an early tour tomorrow so it was quickly to bed.

More Pictures

1577  Diana tapping the samovar to make some tea.  This fireplace/oven in Mandrogy is a smaller version of the one in the farmer's house in Kizhi.

1582  I'm standing in front of a very old Russian windmill.

1624  Diana and I attending the captain's dinner.

1650  Sunset on May 25 at Midnight.  No cloud cover tonight so you can see all the color.  There's no Photoshop effects in this picture, pure camera.

1651  As the sun went down and it became the 16th the sky kept getting bluer.  An amazing show.

A trip to Russialand

1516  Midnight on the veranda of room 308 the Viking Helgi.  The cloud cover is heavy and only two slivers of red are visible from the sunset.

1521  A wooden house in Mandrogy with a field of dandelions.  Pretty sight.  I can hear my PA Dutch grandmother muttering, "All  that salad going to waste."  Dandelion is a German delacacy in Eastern PA but you have to pick it before it flowers or it's really bitter.

1525  The Inn, Dining Room and Bakery in Mandrogy.

1527  The table of baked goods on the porch of the Inn.  The cherry are the round ones at the total bottom left of the picture and the triangular ones above that are the cranberry.

 

May 25 – Senic Waterway & Mandrogy, Russia.  I forgot to mention yesterday that Kizhi is only about 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle so it will be cooler and the day will be long.  I took a picture at Midnight, you can see that the sun has just set, the red glow is still visible just below the heavy cloud cover.  I'm not sure when it got light but when I woke up a 4AM  and looked out it was full daylight.  I don't think it really got dark, just a few hours of twilight.

 

Today we will be cruising until 10AM, very civilized.  We left Kizhi Island on Lake Onega yesterday and sailed a bit back the way we came until we came to the Svir River on the western shore of the lake.  We sailed down the Svir to Mandrogy.  This will be an unusual stop as it's not a real village.  It's sort of a 15^th to 19^th century Russian Disneyland.  The man who built it has another one near Saint Petersburg and decided to build this one specifically to give the river cruise ships a place to stop for part of the day.  It worked; there were five cruise ships here today.  Fortunately we were the first and had a pretty good look around before the others arrived and the place got busier.  They easily handled the people from the ships and it never seemed crowded.

 

It's an interesting place because there are not only shops and lots of old style buildings.  One area has craftsmen working at their trades.  Mostly they make things to sell but some of the items are for use in the village.  For example, the blacksmith makes decorative wall hangings, knives and iron roses as well as other dust catchers for your home.  But he also repairs the old wagons and shoes the horses that give you wagon rides around the property.  There's a baker, glass maker, jeweler, scrimshaw artist, weaver, wood carver, silk painter (she had some beautiful scarves), a potter and a lace maker.  Everyone is using techniques and methods from the appropriate period.

 

In another building artisans were painting matryoshka dolls, children's cloth dolls or fancy eggs.  Of course, Diana wanted to shop and I was indifferent to that activity.  So I stalled around looking for photo opportunities.  Some of the artisans were in the middle of interesting projects so I shot some of them.  I hate to bother someone when they're working or concentrating on something so I don't use a flash and I don't ask them to pose.  I just try to catch their activity at a good point. 

 

I did find the village bakery and the table of goods they had out front was very nice.  Mostly filled pastry but the fillings were interesting.  They had both sweet and savory choices.  There were fish, chicken, beef, vegetable, cherry, cranberry, several cheeses, apple, blackberry, green onion & egg and custard filled pastries.  They had a blackberry open-faced tart that they had sliced like a pizza.  Diana loves cherry and I like cranberry so I bought one of each for the princely sum of 140 rubles, about $4.50 for two large fruit filled pastries.  When you figure that we're in a tourist place, that's excellent.  (We ate them for breakfast the next day and they were really good.)

 

It was fun watching the craftsmen work, especially the blacksmith, a very active profession.  Some of the later ships are eating lunch in the large, covered picnic pavilions.  I saw the chefs preparing some large shish kabobs on a huge grill set between the two seating areas.  Looked and smelled delicious.

 

Just before we sailed they had the "Taste of Russia" on the Sky Deck.  They set up 6 stations with different Russian foods from sausages and cheese, to dumplings that looked and tasted a lot like Chinese dim sum.  One was almost exactly like shu mai.  They had chicken legs and of course blini (those crazy pancakes that they sell as street food in St. Petersburg) with fruit. 

 

We're taking off for Saint Petersburg and it's a long way to go from here.  We have to cross the largest lake in Europe (14^th largest by area in the world) to get there.  We sailed down the Svir to Lake Lagoda as the Captain's farewell dinner was starting.  For some reason, totally unknown to me we have been invited to eat at the captain's table.  It wound up that there was one other couple there, the Captain, his translator, the hotel manager and the cruise director, a pretty young girl named Oxana.  Diana was seated next to the captain and I was seated next to Oxana so I guess we did all right.  Usually this honor is reserved for people who have been with the cruise line the longest or are staying in the best rooms.  It's our first cruise with Viking and we're in a nice room but not nearly the most expensive.  We're the only people that are sailing back to Moscow on the ship and from what I've gathered back to back sailing is just not done on river cruises.  Maybe the captain just wanted to evaluate these strange Americans who've decided to do that.  Don't know but there we were and it was a fun evening.  The captain is a personable man who understands some English but would rather speak through an interpreter.  One of the ship's guides was filling that role.

 

One thing I have noticed about Russians.  They apparently love Texans or at least the idea of Texas.  I'm sure they relate it to western movies but they always smile and nod while repeating "Texas!" which sounds great with a Russian accent.  Diana wore a Russian pheasant headdress to dinner.  It was a big hit.  Even the captain had to smile when he saw it.

 

At 10PM we had the guest show.  Diana was in the play Cinderella as the left curtain. 

Has anyone seen my hammer?

1369  The bridge of the Viking Helgi.  The executive officer is in the all blue uniform standing next to Natasha, a ship's manager.  He was answering questions about the ship and operations.

1403  The Church of Intercession, the first structure built in the Kizhi Pogost.  It's an all season church, meaning it's heated.

1406  The Bell Tower and a bit of the Transfiguration Church

1409  The Transfiguration Church.  As you can see it's undergoing restoration, but then what old building isn't.  Thirteen of its twenty two domes are visible in this picture.

 

 

May 24 – Kizhi, Russia.  This morning started out with a talk about current Russian politics and the economy.  It's always interesting to see how the people perceive their events as it relates to what is presented to us by the US media.  My conclusion is that they are no more accurate and unbiased that they are about politics and events in the USA.

 

After the presentation the captain invited us to the bridge in small groups.  It was nice to see the operations center for the ship.  The Helgi was built in the 1980s and carried only Russians for years.  Viking acquired it in the late 1990s and refitted it to suit other European, American and Australian/New Zealand travelers.  Many of the controls are old style but it has the latest in electronic navigational equipment, RADAR and GPS.  Nothing much was happening so there was no real activity to observe.

 

This afternoon we are stopping at Kizhi Island.  To get there we kept going north on the Seksna River to the White Lake.  After crossing the lake we were in the Volga-Baltic Canal.  After dropping down through 5 locks we entered Lake Onega.  It's the second largest lake in Europe and the 18^th largest by area in the world.  The lake has almost 1650 islands and were heading to one of them, Kizhi.

 

Kizhi has a collection of 89 wooden structures that date from the 15^th to the 20^th centuries.  The most spectacular one is the Transfiguration Church.  It has 22 domes is entirely made of wood and has absolutely no nails.  It's all pegged or mortised.  It's an amazing structure built in 1714.  It doesn't seem quite real but yet, there it is.  The main logs are Scotch pine, the planks are spruce and the domes are of aspen shingles. 

 

The iconic scene of Kizhi is the Kizhi Pogost.  It's a walled area that holds three structures.  The oldest is the Church of the Intercession built in 1694.  It's a heated church and can have services all year long.  It's a small church but still manages to sport 9 domes.  In 1714 the 22-dome Transfiguration Church was completed and soon after that they built the bell tower.  This set of buildings is all that most people would recognize about the island and for good reason, they are beautiful and majestic.  Unfortunately we did not see them in sunshine where the aspen tiles covering the domes would gleam like they were made of silver.  But it wasn't raining and the light, although not bright enough to provide much contrast for detail was certainly ok.  All the structures in the pogost are original to Kizhi.

 

Since those large spectacular buildings were already here it was decided that the island would become a museum for old wooden structures.  The have churches, bell towers, homes, barns, a sauna, a windmill and other wooden structures moved here from all over Russia.

 

The Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus from Murom Monastery is the oldest remaining wooden church in Russia (second half of the 14th century).  It's small and has only one dome but the design and execution of the structure are elegant and very pleasing to the eye.  It is believed to have been built by the monk Lazarus around 1300.  It was the first structure of what was to become the Murom Monastery.  It developed a reputation for curing the sick and the church became popular with pilgrims.  It's only about 10 feet tall, so physical stature has nothing to do with it. 

 

The house of peasant Oshevnev from 1876 was open and there were docents in the rooms to explain their purpose and ladies to demonstrate some of the crafts.  Contrary to what most non-Europeans believe, peasants were not necessarily poor and downtrodden.  Some peasants were moderately wealthy, but they worked with their hands and were usually not very well advanced in formal education.  Oschevnev was exactly that.  His house is quite large and very well furnished.  He was a farmer and owned livestock. 

 

We went immediately upstairs as the downstairs was for livestock.  We entered a large room with a brick and plaster fireplace, kitchen stove and oven combination.  The firebox is at the bottom and on the side I was sitting it had several places to put things to either cook or heat them.  The largest of these would have been used like an oven.  It was above the fire box but the heat had to come up through side slots.  It looks like a small fire could have been built on the floor of this space for light cooking, heating water or grilling because it had a rack with six inch long legs setting on one side that could have been moved over some coals for grilling.  Some spaces were a long way from the firebox and had no direct vent from it.  These would have been used for keeping things warm as I'm sure the brick transfers a good deal of heat.

 

About a third of the room was on one side of a board that ran across the room lengthwise about 6.5 feet off the floor.  Our guide told us that if other farmers or visitors came to the house they could come into this room but only as far as this board unless invited further.  The space he would have been in had a bench by the fireplace wall so he would be warm and have a place to sit.  He could even have eaten a meal and spent the night without leaving that space, just a way to maintain some privacy while still being hospitable in what can be a very inhospitable climate.  The house is elongated on one side of the gable.  This area serves as storage and workspace.  The owners wagon and team would have been kept there.

 

From the farmhouse we walked across the island, not as daunting as it sounds because the island is only about 200 yards wide at this point, to the Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus and then down the path a little further to get to the old windmill.

 

Our time was almost us so we walked back to the pier around the other side of the Transfiguration Church and out of the historic area.  On the way to the pier there are vendors, of course.  They didn't have anything I wanted to buy so it was an easy trip.

More Pictures

1291  The Church of the Entry into the Temple and it's Bell Tower with the churches of Gabriel the Archangel and St. Cyril.   These are some of the churches of the Assumption Priory in the Monastery. 

1308  Our student guide at the town school and our ship's escort Natasha.

1313  The English class where we heard the presentation on Scotland and our group.  Diana's fourth from the right.

1333  The reconstructed Viking Fort.  The assembly/meeting room is on the second floor at the top of the double stairways.

1345  The Nativity Church in Krokhino.  Destroyed when the waterway was built.

 

'Monk'eying Around in Kuzino with St. Cyril

1256  The 'volunteer' cast of the Viking presentation.

1273  The inside of the outer wall of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery.  This section was the former political prison.

1278  The Holy Gate, Entrance to the priory grounds of the Assumption Priory.

1284  School kids, checking us out.

1284  Murals in the Holy Gate Church of St. Seergus, discovered during restoration.

 

 

May 23 – Kuzino, Russia-Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery.  To get here from Uglich we sailed down the Volga River, across the Rybinsk Reservoir that I've described before and then down the Seksna River to the pier.  Today we are docking in Kuzino for the sole purpose of visiting the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery.  Or at least so I thought. 

 

An enterprising local entrepreneur is recreating a fort from the days when the Rus' ruled most of the area known as Russia.  The Rus' were descendants of Viking who had come here on vacation and decided it was ok to stay.  Part of the fort is done but the main house has been constructed.  He is trying to be historically accurate.  The downstairs would have been living area and the upstairs was the meeting hall.  It's the home of the prince of the locality. 

 

The actor who played narrator was very authentic looking, a large man with long dark hair and a short beard and mustache.  He had a booming voice and his accent just added to the recreation.  He was dressed in a red, short, belted tunic, with bloused trousers and boots.  He told us about his life and the building and fort we were in.  The he picked a man to be the prince, another to be his bodyguard and one more to be the berserker (a big, semi-wild, strong man to protect the princess.  He picked a woman to be the princess.  He had authentic costumes for each of them that were attractive.  The hardest thing to get on was the chain mail tunic of the prince's bodyguard.  The berserker was easiest, all he wore was a bearskin where the head was his cap and the rest just draped over his back and shoulders.  The bodyguard had on a tunic with the chain mail over it, an iron helmet and was carrying a large sword and shield.  The prince was wearing an emerald green long tunic with gold accents and belt, a crimson fur-trimmed robe, a fur trimmed hat and was carrying a large flask made from a bull's horn.  The princess also had a similar hat, a long crimson dress with gold piping and pearls and a cape of blue and silver.  Under her had she had on a white cloth headdress held in place with a silver band from which rows of silver disks hunt to either side of her face.  They looked very authentic.  The moderator then sang us a song of the time extoling the strength of the prince and the beauty of the princess.

 

This kind of thing can get pretty hokey but this presentation was enjoyable, informative and funny at the right places.  Sometimes I burn out part way through them but not this time.  Definitely a good time.  When we walked out of the meeting hall we could see the crew of the ship standing on deck three wearing their life jackets.  Apparently a crew safety drill was underway.  Of course, we waived to them and they waved back.  Some of the below deck crew didn't recognize any of us but the Filipino waiters waived and hammed it up.

 

Now we are headed out to the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery.  It's a way out of town and on some pretty hoppy roads.  Occasionally just enough rise and drop to make you light in your seat for a moment.  The driver seemed to know where they were an slowed a bit so no one's butt actually left the seat.  It was kind of fun actually.

 

In about 30 minutes we arrived at the entrance to the monastery.  At one time it was the largest monastery in Northern Russia.  It's dedicated to the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos and is sometimes referred to as the Dormition Monastery of Saint Cyril,

 

The monastery was founded in 1397 by Saint Cyril.  He had a cave dug, then built a wooden chapel dedicated to the Assumption and a house of logs for the monk's living quarters.

 

The government in Moscow thought of this area as very important center for trade to the north and military defense of their northern border so they encouraged its development.  During the Byzantine era a center was developed for the translation of textbooks on various subjects.

 

By the 1500s the monastery was the second wealthiest landholder in all of Russia.  Ivan the Terrible had his own cell here (the place where a monk lives, not a prison) and planned to take his monastic vows at this monetary.  Speaking of prisons, the cloister here was used as a political prison for Muscovite politicians.

 

The large walled monastery actually has two priories (so they had two abbots), the Assumption and Ivanofsky, and eleven churches with the great majority of them being over 500 years old.  Nine belong to the larger Assumption Priory.  The Assumption Cathedral was built in 1497 and at the time was the largest monastery church in Russia.  The iconostasis held many ancient icons that are now in the museum in the former abbot's residence.  The silver Beautiful Gates endowed by Czar Alexis in 1645 are also there but I can't show you the icons or the gates because no pictures are allowed and we didn't get any postcards.

 

The monastery's walls are 21 feet thick, some were part of an earlier citadel built to resist the Polish attack.  When they were doing some restoration they discovered some well preserved frescoes from the 1500s in the gate church of Saint Sergius.

 

We walked around the grounds of the monastery and had a thorough visit of the museum.  It has almost the complete collection of icons from the cathedral.  It's an impressive collection of ancient icons.  I'm not sure there's one to match it anywhere.

 

From the monastery we drove to the local school.  It's sort of like a middle school and high school combined.  Classes were still in session but they are close to the end of their year.  A pretty 9^th grader was our hostess.  After greeting us in English, she took us around the building showing us various displays and artifacts the school has collected.  We visited a class where a younger girl was giving a lesson she had prepared in English to her English class.  Her subject was Scotland and she had a Powerpoint style presentation to illustrate her talk.  Her pronunciation was actually very good.  I'm pretty sure they handpicked her to present for us.  She had her facts down on Scotland.  I'd have given her an A.

 

From the classroom we went to the assembly hall for a brief presentation by the students.  A girl and boy were dressed in native costume.  He played an accordion style instrument but it had buttons on both sides, no piano style keys.  The girl recited a poem in English.  After the show they had some handicrafts made by the students in their art classes for sale.  I bought a little cross stitched bag that I thought was very attractive.

 

Then it was back on the bus and down to the port.  The Viking Fort has a display of old boats, more like canoes actually, that I had to take some pictures of on the way to the ship.  The best one was a twin outrigger that looked like a dragon or sea serpent. 

 

As we sailed down the river we passed the ruined church of The Nativity in Krokhino.  Another victim of the building of the waterway. 

More Pictures

1117  The Heaven mural from St. Elijah's Church.  I love how orderly it is.  Different groups each on their own cloud with God (in the gold with the beard), Jesus (In the white, clean shaven) and the Holy Spirit (the Dove) completely and serenely in charge.

1118  St. Elijah's Church on the Soviet Square in Yaroslavl.  All the other buildings facing the square were built by the Soviets and used for their purposes.

1130  This is the painting by Vereschagin that I mentioned.  The Kremlin looks odd with white walls.

1135  Reading a War Telegram by Solomatkin.  It's easy to see the influence of the Impressionists on his work.  Either that or he was naturally one of them.

1136  Even this rather crude picture of Antipov-Ilya has the ability to grab my attention.  In person it was mesmerizing. 

1163  We passed this unidentified church near the village of Khimki on the banks of the Moscow Canal.  Not in very good repair but one of the prettiest I've seen.

Can someone identify these icons for me?

1067  This is Yaroslavl's War Memorial.  You can see how the lady is looking directly at the soldier but he's staring to her right into the distance.  The flowers were beautiful and in the center of the main floral display is an eternal flame.

1074  Assumption Cathedral in Yaroslavl.  You can see it's just gold and white with minimal black roof tiles.  The sole exception is the ceramic tile work around the top of the center onion dome's barrel.

1077  Diana's standing on the overlook at the confluence of the Volga and Kotorosl Rivers.  Just below her you can see the city's shield in flowers, the bear with an axe on his shoulder.

1092  The murals of the Nativity and Temple Presentation of Jesus on the ceiling of St Elijah's Church.

1102  The Beautiful Gates of St. Elijah's Church with the icon of the Madonna and Child on the left and Jesus on the right.

 

May 22 – Yaroslavl, Russia.  We have been sailing on the Rybinsk Reservoir for some time today.  At the time it was filled it what the largest manmade body of water on earth, with a surface area of over a million acres.  It's fed by over 60 rivers and is a vital link in the waterway from Moscow to St. Petersburg.  Both the Volga and Sheksna Rivers were dammed and over 700 villages were flooded out.  The dams were finished in 1941 and it wasn't until 1947 that the lake reached full capacity.

 

Yaroslavl is another of the historic Golden Ring cities, the largest.  Now it's a major industrial city that stretches for 18 miles on both sides of the Volga River.  It has a diesel engine, tire and petrochemical plants because it's at the hub of road, rail and river transportation systems.  It's been an important commercial city since the 11^th century.  Its many 17^th century churches and the fact that it's a great example of the urban planning reforms ordered by Catherine the Great have landed it the title of UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

 

It was founded in 1010AD by the Prince of Kievan Rus', Yaroslavl the Wise.  Rus' was the former name of Russia.  In the 13th and 14^th centuries the city consisted almost completely of wooden houses.  During this time it was destroyed several times by fires, besieged by the Mongol Horde, the Golden Horde and also the Plague twice.  It the 16^th century things took a turn for the better, the Volga was becoming a major trade route, Ivan the Terrible came to power and supported Yaroslavl by instating a building program.  It was attacked by the Poles in the early 1600 but it was not successful.  The Poles did capture Moscow so for a few months in 1612 it was the capital of Russia until the Poles could be driven out of the Kremlin in Moscow.

 

We departed for the older part of the city.  On our way we passed the very pretty red brick and white with black domes, Church of the Archangel Michael.  Our first stop will be at a park near the confluence of the Volga & Kotorosl Rivers.  The bus parked next to a memorial for Russian soldiers in Afghanistan.  Two large blocks of granite, separated by about 20 feet and set at angles to each other, have faces carved into one corner.  On one block it's the head and shoulders of a woman and the angle of the corner she's carved into has her looking at the other block.  The corner of the other block she's looking at has the head and shoulders of a Russian soldier carved into it and the angle of the block has the corner looking past the carving of the woman, not at her.  I'm pretty sure the sculptor meant to convey the fact that the woman is still remembering the soldier who died but the soldier is looking into the unknown or eternity if you like.  A message symbolically represented in stone but all too real in the hearts and minds of many relatives of military men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country and culture. 

 

We walked across the park to an overlook by the Assumption Cathedral.  The meeting of the rivers is a very pretty place.  They've landscaped a park at the river level.  It has a large fountain and a statue at the point where the rivers meet but I can't tell what it is.  Looks like it could be Varoslavl and might commemorate the Millennium of the city in 1010.

 

The Assumption Cathedral is a large white building with 7 golden onion domes (five on the roof of the sanctuary and one each on the roofs of the transepts) and black roof tiles.  The only real decoration is ceramic tiles around the top of the main dome's barrel and some large, colorful tiles set into façade at the base of the stairway columns. 

 

Our bus parked at the Soviet Square right next to St. Elijah's Church and from there we'll set out on foot.  Soviet Square is named for the fact that it is bounded by Soviet constructed buildings on three sides.  One was the meeting place for the local Communist Party; the others were administrative building that implemented and oversaw Soviet policy.  The party building is a very austere structure in grey.  Corners are very square, absolutely nothing to make it seem welcoming or warm.  The Hammer, Sickle and Star carved at the top of the middle windows on either side of the doorway don't add to the friendliness of the place.  The one attractive thing about it is the large bronze copy of the city seal over the main entrance.  It depicts a bear walking upright with a long handled axe over his shoulder.  The shield he's depicted on is topped by a crown. 

 

We went inside St. Elijah's Church and it's decorated in typical style.  Murals cover almost every surface that is not already covered in icons.  The murals are very colorful and clear so I suspect they've been restored lately.  It icons are also very bright and the detail is very visible so they must have been restored also.  The iconostasis is 7 rows tall, a new record for me.  Some of the rows are very short but there are seven of them.  The Last Supper is at the very top as well as its usual place right above the Beautiful Gates.  Icons are painted in a very stylized fashion and unless they have symbols I'm familiar with I'm lost.  Murals with actions are easier to interpret. 

 

The first icon to the right of the Beautiful Gates appears to be John the Baptist.  He's almost always depicted carrying a very small Jesus but not this time.  Next to John is the Prophet Elijah in the place usually reserved for the patron of the church. 

 

Next to the gates on the right is apparently the Dormition of Mary.  There's Jesus and angels in heaven looking down on a group of women in red surrounding a woman in gold.  Two angels appear to be making their way to earth to get her.  Then again I could be totally wrong.  The only major icon I'm sure of is the next one on the right.  It's the Archangel Michael and he appears to be involved in some of the activities of the Tribulation Period. 

 

The ceiling murals are colorful and easy to see.  Not so easy to photograph, but I think I did ok.  The large center panel has a scene much like the one of Mary that I'm not sure about but in this depiction it appears that Mary has arrived in heaven as all those surrounding her have the halos of saints.

 

We left the main sanctuary and went to a smaller space that served as the winter church.  Generally the churches are not heated because the ceilings are so tall the heat would never get down to the floor anyway.  They had smaller chapels off the main sanctuary that could be heated so the liturgy could be carried out through the long, hard Russian winter.  Waiting for us in the winter chapel was another six-man a cappella group.  Once again they were excellent.  The bass didn't have the voice of the one in Uglich but he was very good.  The acoustics of the chapel were great and that just added that little extra punch.  In Uglich they were singing in a large, rectangular room that didn't help them at all but they were still a bit better.

 

From there we went to a little anteroom that was also completely covered in murals.  These had not been restored lately and were much paler and more damaged than those in the sanctuary.  But because we were much closer to them they were still very easy to see if not to interpret.  The center panel of the ceiling was clearly a depiction of heaven.  All three members of the Trinity were in one large circle of clouds at the top.  Angels were flying everywhere and the saints were grouped in some way also sitting on a cloud by group.  Could have been prophets on one cloud, apostles on the next, martyrs on a third, you get the idea.  If I could only read Russian, the groups are all labeled but not the individuals.

 

From the Soviet Square we walked together for a few blocks to the city's central market.  It was fantastic.  The fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, baked goods and sweets were all beautiful and nicely displayed.  Since the Russian trains do not have diners and the snacks available from your car attendant are limited I'm planning to stock up on some provisions for the 36 hour train ride from Moscow to Vienna.  I started my collection today with about a pound of dried fruit, mango, figs, apricots, and a few things I'm going to have to taste to find out what they are.  That will not be an onerous task.

 

There's a small brick chapel on the market square that has two domes, neither of the onion style.  It's the Alexander Nevsky Chapel, the same name as the main cathedral we saw in Tallinn Estonia.  The guide at the time told us that the Russians had built that church and now here's a chapel to the same guy.  He was a soldier, politician, prince and after his death a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church.  He was so well respected that Catherine I introduced the Order of Alexander Nevsky as one of the highest military decoration Russia had.  He won an epic battle against foreign knights on ice in 1242 that resulted in their expulsion from the parts of Russia they had occupied.  This was long before Western European tacticians had learned that foot soldiers could defeat mounted knights in full armor but that's what Alexander did.

 

Our last stop was at the governor's palace.  It's a living museum to Russian art, history and culture.  We were met by our guide in the foyer; she's playing the part of one of the governor's daughters.  She welcomed us to her home while flanked by two officers in the local army detachment.  She led us upstairs and while we toured each room told us about the art and artifacts we were seeing as well as the traditions and activities of her family that took place there.  It was a very nice alternative to just facts and figures.  Some of the art was extraordinary.  One painting showed the Kremlin in Moscow from the corner where we entered to see the armory.  The walls were white in 1879 and I remembered that our guide had mentioned that during the tour.  It gives the place a much less foreboding look when the walls are white.  It almost becomes a fairy castle looking affair.  The artist was Pyotr Petrovich Vereschagin.  Not only is the subject very nice the painting is lovely.  Two other paintings caught my eye, Reading a War Telegram (to Earnings) by Leonid Ivanovich Solomatkin and A Portrait of the Mining Engineer Alexey Ivanovich Antipov by Ilya Efimovich Repen.  The Solomatkin painting is Impressionistic is style and I was immediately struck by it.  It's a bit unusual for a portrait to call itself to my attention but this one is really great.  The face captures your attention as if the man himself were sitting there.  The face expressed his personality and emotion of the moment so well it was like you could hear him speaking.  Like I say, portraits are not my favorite kind of painting but this one definitely was.  The last time a portrait struck me this way was when I saw Rembrandt van Rijn's Old Man in Military Costume.  It used to be called Portrait of Rembrandt's Father) at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  That one stopped me in my tracks too.

 

When we got back to the ballroom a bit of a surprise was waiting.  A classical trio of women (piano, violin and cello) was waiting to play for us.  The played two familiar pieces but I can't name them.  There was also a four mam a cappella group that sang.  This time the first tenor was the standout.  He had a marvelous voice, clear as a bell and totally controlled, no sliding into the notes.  Wonderful!  The other museum guide came in to join our, her sister in the play along with the two officers and they danced for us to the music of the trio.  The danced a waltz, a quadrille and minuet.  All done in very formal style, no freelancing.  It was very enjoyable.  Of course, at one point they came to get dance partners from the group and Diana was asked to do the quadrille.  She loves to participate with ethnic and historical dancers to of course she didn't hesitate a bit.  It was a good time and enjoyable visit.

 

After that it was back to the boat for some late afternoon sailing on the Volga.  We are heading north and the days are getting longer and longer.  It's very light at 10:30PM and the gloaming, as the Scots call twilight, lasts for another hour and a half.  You can see pretty well until almost midnight.