Memorial wanderings
It truly was quite a challenge to even come up with some sort of comprehensive plan to fully explore a city as diverse and interesting as St Petersburg. Like all the truly great cities history is layered on top of history and new ideas and movements are incorporated or overlaid and the build up becomes a little bewildering to keep your bearings as to what relates to what exactly through time. The way it has worked out is that kind of naturally everything has worked out into themed days. One man made this a whole lot easier for our second to last day in the city, this was to be our first real encounter with some of the results of Stalin’s extreme paranoia and prejudice.
Understandably apprehensive about a city that was built as a symbol of the Csars he sought to move the focus away from the historic heart of the city and with no room left there anyway the expanses in the southern sections were where his vision was brought into being during the 1930s. The metro may be amazing but so far has not proved particularly useful. With us basically having stuck to a fairly central area and the extreme spacing of the stations there has not been any real need to dive hundreds of metres underground. Now we emerged onto Moskovskaya Prospekt and went in search of the neoclassically inspired monolith that is the House of Soviets. Originally intended to house the whole of the administration for the city and designed by then in favour Trotsky it is a seriously impressive edifice and even better had another great statue of Lenin in front of it.
It takes some extreme curvature to come close to fitting it all in.
Lonely Planet lies! Deciding against multiple three mile treks to take in the Moscow Gates as well as the Siege Memorial we set off for the spot for the latter marked on the LP map. With no forty eight metre high obelisk rising from the horizon as we supposedly drew nearer it came time to seek help. With only cursory Russian and intimidating looks from those passing by this ended up being a taxi driver looking for some tourists to rip off. He laughed when he saw our map and with his showed us how they were listed the wrong way around meaning we had just walked half and hour the wrong way.
Something that takes some getting used to and at the same time is a great part of the curiosity surrounding Russia is that most standards that you hold in your mind can be paled by comparison with an event in Russian history. Ask most people which single city suffered most in World War II and I’m sure that Hiroshima would be the first response maybe followed by London or Dresden. 900 days after one of the great betrayals in history 1,500,000 St Petersburgers had perished even after the same number had managed to be evacuated. Next time some tedious American starts lamenting their two touchstones of tragedy tell them to look up the Seige of Leningrad. Only nine kilometres from the front lines sits the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad which is impressively moving in its portrayal of the event. Even with such a somber theme we had to be patient in taking our photos working around a wedding party.
After an afternoon of mistiming things it was to be another night out this time keeping Mike and Jeff company until they had to leave for the train station. The most frustrating miss of the afternoon was the Siege Museum which, despite a forced march across the city, we arrived at one minute after the posted last entry time of one hour before closing. Even more frustrating was that when we did return it only took about forty minutes to have a look around. To cheer ourselves up after the afternoon we stopped by a market behind the Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood where amongst all of the tourist bait was a guy selling some really amazing photos and who was a great source of information about soviet era cameras, Rdoc and I are now rather obsessively on the lookout for a фед.
If you have seen the movie Russian Dolls you will understand the reasoning behind the one last feature I wanted to find on our last day. Ul. Zodchego Rossi (literally street of architect Rossi) is commonly known as the street of perfect proportions with the flanking buildings that run the entire length being 220m long, 22m high, and 22m apart perfectly framing the State Museum of Theatre and Music at the far end. While there was no Lucy Gordon sashaying down the centre line it was pretty cool to have your vision so perfectly shaped.
Lucy Gordon is missing but still quite a pretty picture.
Tags: architecture, monument/memorial, museum, Russia, St Petersburg, Travel
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