Tag Archives: Russia

The Golden Ring

The Golden Ring is the name given to Russia’s most famous historical region, a handful of towns around Moscow which have been centres of Russian culture and politics for centuries. We visited four of the towns.

Sergiev Posad

This small town is easy to reach as a day trip from Moscow. The trip itself was quite interesting – our first experience of a Russian local train, it’s a bit like a live version of the shopping channel with vendors walking through the carriage selling everything from ice creams to train timetables to suction hooks. Sergiev Posad is best known for its monastery which is still home to black robed, long bearded monks.

Unfortunately for us, some of the major buildings of the monastery are undergoing restoration work at the moment, so we didn’t see it at its most impressive.

Sergiev Posad when we visited (top) and without the scaffolding

Still the monastery contains some beautiful buildings and lots of visitors are there as pilgrims to visit the remains of St Sergius in the Trinity Cathedral and take home a bottle of holy water from the fountain in the courtyard. We queued up to see the silver sarcophagus and then felt a bit fraudulent not to be crossing ourselves and kissing the lid.

Exalted Trinity Monastery of St Sergius (clockwise from top left): monk walking through grounds, visitor at a shrine, church above the Holy Gates, ikon

It was a really hot day, so on the way back to the station we had a refreshing glass of Kvas, a local soft drink made from fermented rye bread which is much tastier than it sounds!

Vladimir

Vladimir was a nice change of pace after the bustle of Moscow. A medium sized town which is not just reliant on tourism, but does have some great historic buildings. We were lucky enough to find an excellent host for our stay here (also named Vladimir). He was not only generous enough to meet us at the train station and drive us to the house, but he and his wife entertained us for an evening of Russian banya, barbecue and conversation (aided by a Russian-English dictionary!).

Tonya and Vlad, yummy barbecued chicken, between Banya sessions!

The day that we visited the town’s museums happened to be an open day which meant that they were free but also very busy with locals. The Golden Gate in the centre of the main street is the last surviving remnant of the town’s medieval defences. It now contains a military exposition with an audio visual element which the administrator switched to English for us, much to the confusion of the locals! The town is also home to two cathedrals, the small Cathedral of St Demetrius of Salonica which although plain inside has hundreds of carvings outside, and the beautiful Assumption Cathedral where Russia’s earliest rulers were crowned.

Vladimir museums (clockwise from top left): The Golden Gate, carvings on the Cathedral of St Demetrius of Salonica, glasswork in the Crystal Museum, forge at the blacksmith’s workshop

The Assumption Cathedral at sunset

Suzdal

It feels as if every second building in Suzdal is a church – at one time there was a church for every 12 of its inhabitants along with 15 monasteries, and although not all of these survive, there are still a lot left! It’s quite a small sleepy town now, very pretty and easy to wander around. Many of the houses in the town are wooden and some have ornate carvings along the eaves and around the windows.

Churches at the Monastery of Our Saviour and St Euthimius, inside the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Savior, domes of the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin

Suzdal also has a small museum of wooden architecture, similar to the one which we visited in Riga. The standout building here is the beautiful wooden Church of the Transfiguration and it was also interesting to see the reconstructions that they have of the building interiors.

Us outside a peasant’s house, windmill and weathervane, kitchen reconstruction

The Church of Transfiguration, wooden tiles on the dome, inside the Church of the Resurrection

Bogolyubovo

Bogolyubovo is mentioned in our guidebook as a side trip from Vladimir and it was recommended to us twice (by Eva who we met at our hostel in Moscow, and again by Vlad and Tonya). We decided to fit it into our spare afternoon before the train to Yekaterinburg, and we’re very glad that we did. The bus let us off near to the very active convent. The interior of the cathedral is beautifully painted and was further enhanced by the nuns’ choir practice. Outside we saw the remains of the original cathedral and another two nuns washing the windows – they definitely wouldn’t have passed a HSE assessment…

We then took the path past the railway station and over the somewhat flooded fields to the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl. This small single domed church dates from the 12th century and was commissioned by Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky who sited his royal palace here and developed Vladimir into the capital of Rus.

Here’s our Golden Ring round up:

What photo takes you right back to the Golden Ring?

Bogolyubovo wasn’t in our original plans but we both loved the simplicity and location of this church.

Summarise the Golden Ring in three words.

Churches
Cathedrals
Monasteries

You really know you’re in the Golden Ring when…

You find yourself lining up another shot of church domes.

What one item should you definitely pack when going to the Golden Ring?

Julie: a scarf to cover your hair in the churches.

Moscow Round Up

Here’s our Moscow round up:

What photo takes you right back to Moscow?

It’s an iconic image of Moscow – St Basil’s Cathedral seen from Red Square. For our first week here, Red Square (and the entry to St Basil’s) was fenced off due to preparations for the Victory Day parade, so we had to delay our visit into our second week. Although similar to St Petersburg’s Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood on the outside, St Basil’s Cathedral is quite different inside. Rather than the huge open space with vibrant wall mosaics that we’ve seen in many Orthodox churches, it is subdivided into 9 smaller churches (one under each dome, and one under the steeple), each with its own iconostasis and mostly subdued wall paintings.

Summarise Moscow in three words.

Uncompromising – Moscow doesn’t pander to tourists, it’s getting on with its own business and if you’re lost or struggling then tough. And if the Kremlin museums need to close for a day then they do so without notice either on their website or at the ticket offices. That said, we came across plenty of nice people, like the girl behind me in the coffee queue who murmured “inside or outside” as I was staring uncomprehendingly at the harried cashier who was barking at me in Russian.
Large scale – the city is huge and you definitely need to get to grips with the metro system (itself quite uncompromising) to get around. The ‘Seven Sisters’ skyscrapers are built on a monumental scale, and the Tsar cannon and bell in the Kremlin show that the Muscovites mean business.
Soviet – there are lots of reminders of Soviet times around the city from mosaics in the metro system to hammer and sickle carvings on buildings and lots of statues of Lenin (not to mention the man himself)

You really know you’re in Moscow when…

You’re in a very slow (maybe even unmoving) queue somewhere near the Kremlin.

What one item should you definitely pack when going to Moscow?

A Cyrillic to Roman alphabet conversion chart.

Travelling Underground in Russia

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When staying anywhere we like to use our own two feet to get around – it’s cheaper, we get to see more of the town or city, and the exercise does us good! However, staying in a big city means that sometimes walking just isn’t feasible or we’d be walking all day and not seeing the sight that we want to see. Moscow and St Petersburg are Russia’s two largest cities and so we’ve had to get to grips with their underground rail systems (buses and trams are usually trickier as maps of routes are not so readily available and stops not so well signed). Fortunately both cities have networks that are cheap and pretty straightforward to use.

The metro in St Petersburg is the deepest in the world (by average depth of its stations). The deepest station is Admiralteyskaya at 105m below ground. The escalators down to the platforms are ridiculously long (about 3 minutes by our reckoning). We kept trying to get a photo to show them, but it’s really tricky to get a good perspective. It’s just 28 roubles (about £0.55) for any journey. For that you get a token, something like a fairground ride token, which is fed into the station entrance to let you through the turnstile, you are then free to exit whenever, and from any station. Although stations are fairly far apart, the five lines reach most corners of the city and trains run every 2-3 minutes during the day from one end of the line to the other.

St Petersburg metro: Metro tokens, train arriving at the platform, inside the carriage

It’s a long way down!

The Moscow metro system runs in a similar way to St Petersburg but uses magnetic cards rather than coin tokens. You can buy cards valid for one trip (30 roubles, approx £0.60) or more with prices getting cheaper as you buy more (e.g. 300 roubles for 11 trips works out at approx 27 roubles or £0.55 per trip). It is a larger network with 12 lines and almost 200 stations and we found it a little more confusing to begin with, especially the signs which direct you how to transfer between the different lines within the connecting stations. It’s also been a test of our Russian reading skills as, for the most part, there are no signs (and certainly no announcements) in English. Having a metro map with the stations named in Russian and English has been invaluable and we’ve found that the best way to work out when to get off is to count how many stops we need and then keep track while we’re on the train although this did backfire on us once and we ended up overshooting by a station so we had to swap to the other platform and get the next train back! Moscow’s metro is the 4th busiest in the world (after Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing) and we really got a feel for that when travelling at rush hour.

Moscow metro: station name on platform (Belorusskaya), metro station marker on street, busy Taganskaya station

Some of the stations in St Petersburg are quite impressive with chandeliers and mosaics, and Avtovo’s glass faced columns were the real stand-out, but you can think of them as a warm-up act for the Moscow stations. Stalin ordered that the metro stations should be designed to glorify the the Soviet system and awe the people. We spent a few hours one afternoon hopping from station to station and admiring the designs (all for the price of one trip – good value sightseeing!).

Light and airy Avtovo station, St Petersburg

Different styles of decoration at metro stations (clockwise from top left): ceiling mosaic at Belorusskaya, station chandelier at Prospekt Mira, stained glass at Novoslobodskaya, wall mosaic at Kievskaya

Komsomolskaya station, Moscow

Andrew played with exposure times to show the movement in Prospekt Mira station, Moscow

There’s even a short stretch of monorail in the Moscow transport system

St Petersburg round up

Here’s our St Petersburg round up:

What photo takes you right back to St Petersburg?

This was a tough one. We did so much that it was difficult to choose a single photo, but we decided on the magnificent Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood. Not only because its even more impressive inside than out, but our hostel was just a block away from it so we saw it every day.

Summarise St Petersburg in three words.

Splendour – From the State rooms in the Hermitage, the fountains of Peterhof, the various churches and cathedrals, and the architecture throughout and underneath the city, St Petersburg is a stunning feast for the eyes
Peter – Peter the Great was responsible for establishing a fortress here and (temporarily) moving the capital of Russia from Moscow to St Petersburg. His image is everywhere, and he gave the city its name!
Lie-ins – something about the city made us sleep later than usual – a difficult cycle to break once you’ve started on it. Maybe it was the later opening times of the museums (typically about 10.30am), maybe it’s just the Russian way (most of the people in or hostel seemed to keep similar hours), or maybe it was the vodka…?

You really know you’re in St Petersburg when….

All the signs look like they ought to be readable but when you try to read them, they don’t actually make sense. The Russian cyrillic alphabet is close enough to the English latin alphabet that you’ll recognise about a third of the letters, but even then you’ll find the pronunciations are almost always different.

What one item should you definitely pack when going to St Petersburg?

A spare camera battery (and sneak in a spare memory card too!)

The Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg

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So we’re finally in Russia. We arrived in St. Petersburg on Monday by high speed train from Helsinki (top speed about 210 km/hr, or 130 miles/hr). It took just 3.5 hours including a relatively brief stop at the border for the passport control people to check that everyone’s documents were in order. I’ve decided that I might join the Russian border control agency after our trip as I would quite like a job where part of the uniform is a fur hat :)

Us on the train before departure from Helsinki station

We’re loving St. Petersburg so far. It’s a bit like a cross between London (big, noisy, lots of traffic, heaps of museums) and Venice (shabby grandeur, canals, extremely stylish wealthy locals). I think it helps that the weather has become spring like as well and we’ve had some sunshine every day!

Yesterday we visited the Hermitage, but more of that later as we intend to have a second day there – it’s absolutely vast, I think you could spend a full week there and not see everything! Today we went to the Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood which is just a 5 minute walk from our excellently situated and very friendly hostel. Because it’s so close we’ve walked past it every day and each time I’ve taken a photo as I just can’t get over how amazingly ornate and colourful it is.

External details

Christ mosaic under the porch next to the canal

And yet the outside was just a taster for the inside. Mosaics cover the whole of the interior and the amount of gold in them seems to make the church glow.

We spent a lot of our visit just gazing upwards.

The church was built on the site where Emperor Alexander II was mortally wounded by revolutionaries in March 1881, and this is where the ‘Spilled Blood’ part of the name comes from. Inside there is a canopy carved from polished stone over the spot.

Some of the mosaics are breathtaking, especially the ones in the roof.

The altar screen is covered in gold and gemstones.

Altar screen details

Internal details

two year trip

Andrew and Julie's Travelling Adventures