Cанкт Петербург
I’m here in Tallinn again for a brief layover before returning to London, still not quite believing that I had actually spent the past four days in St Petersburg. I guess it’s just a place that I never thought I would return to, but right now, I’m already looking back at a pretty interesting and memory-rich trip into the past.
All the old sights I first encountered seven years ago were still there – including the stunning Palace Square outside the Winter Palace. When I first saw a postcard image of the Square, with its imposing Alexander Column, my attention was seized instantly, and I knew it was a place I just had to visit. For who could have imagined that a city of such palatial grandeur could exist in such relatively obscurity in Europe?
But of course, perhaps some don’t consider Russia to be part of Europe. Certainly many Russians don’t. But that’s getting into another deeper discussion altogether. However, when St Petersburg was built as a new capital for the country – by Peter the Great, in fact – it was done consciously to steer Russia towards European enlightenment, away from “Asiatic” Moscow.
And what a great city was erected along the Neva river, upon which a flourishing court, cultural and artistic life soon developed. But many of us are also familiar with the convulsions it’s gone through, visible in the name changes from the Germanic St Petersburg, to the Russified Petrograd, and then to the Communist-inspired Leningrad, before reverting back to St Petersburg after the fall of Communism.
The Palace Square itself might look entirely anodyne today, but a hundred years ago, in 1905, Russian peasants had gathered there to petition the Tsar, only to find themselves targets for his soldiers and their guns, in what turned out to be a bloody Tiananmen on the Baltic. That was also the event which inspired Shostakovitch’s monumental Symphony No. 11, which I count as one of my favourites.
When I was last in St Petersburg, it was a different time in my life, and much has changed since. I was with someone else then, and now, I’m travelling with my parents. Unfortunately for them, in terms of comfort, St Petersburg cannot compare with Helsinki or with Tallinn. The streets are visibly grubbier, the tap water is totally undrinkable, and although there were quite a few head turners around, the people are generally, well, rougher and gruffer.
The language difference doesn’t help, and I had to re-learn my Cyrillic alphabet in order to read the street and other public signs. But it’s kinda neat, once you get the hang of it. For instance, Nevsky Prospect, the main city artery and shopping thoroughfare, is rendered as Hевский Просрект in Russian.
Together with the parents, I reprised some of the trails I did back in 2000, swinging by the St Issac’s Cathedral, the Kazan Cathedral, the St Nicholas Church and the Church of Spilled Blood, along with a visit to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the tombs of the Romanov Tsars can be found. This time round, we checked out the Menshikov Palace, but it was a palace definitely worth missing.
One of the highlights of this return visit was a trip back to the Hermitage, probably one of the world’s greatest art museums, ranking alongside the Louvre of France in terms of the comprehensiveness of its cultural holdings. On display were sizeable quantities of Old Masters, such as Rembrant and Titian and what about this incomparable Matisse, La Danse, which, with its strong tones, heightens the drama and concentration of the dancers, totally lost in their movements.
Perhaps one reason why my previous visit to St Petersburg had seemed to surreal, so different from my other travels, was that it was a place infused with so much meaning and mysticism, symbolic of the deep and rich culture that is Russia. You get a sense of that right away when you step into a darkened Orthodox church, suffused with incense, replete with iconography, and swarming with the pious and the penitent. Some things seem beyond comprehension, but this return trip has, however, made it more real for me.
Travel Notes: We took a daytime train, the Sibelius, from Helsinki to St Petersburg’s Finland Station, the very station Lenin stepped out from when he made his triumphant arrival in St Petersburg in April 1917. Our hotel was as the Dostoevsky, located on Vladimirsky Prospect, opposite the Vladimir Church. Nice pancakes to be had at Teremok, with a few chains across the city.
All the old sights I first encountered seven years ago were still there – including the stunning Palace Square outside the Winter Palace. When I first saw a postcard image of the Square, with its imposing Alexander Column, my attention was seized instantly, and I knew it was a place I just had to visit. For who could have imagined that a city of such palatial grandeur could exist in such relatively obscurity in Europe?
But of course, perhaps some don’t consider Russia to be part of Europe. Certainly many Russians don’t. But that’s getting into another deeper discussion altogether. However, when St Petersburg was built as a new capital for the country – by Peter the Great, in fact – it was done consciously to steer Russia towards European enlightenment, away from “Asiatic” Moscow.
And what a great city was erected along the Neva river, upon which a flourishing court, cultural and artistic life soon developed. But many of us are also familiar with the convulsions it’s gone through, visible in the name changes from the Germanic St Petersburg, to the Russified Petrograd, and then to the Communist-inspired Leningrad, before reverting back to St Petersburg after the fall of Communism.
The Palace Square itself might look entirely anodyne today, but a hundred years ago, in 1905, Russian peasants had gathered there to petition the Tsar, only to find themselves targets for his soldiers and their guns, in what turned out to be a bloody Tiananmen on the Baltic. That was also the event which inspired Shostakovitch’s monumental Symphony No. 11, which I count as one of my favourites.
When I was last in St Petersburg, it was a different time in my life, and much has changed since. I was with someone else then, and now, I’m travelling with my parents. Unfortunately for them, in terms of comfort, St Petersburg cannot compare with Helsinki or with Tallinn. The streets are visibly grubbier, the tap water is totally undrinkable, and although there were quite a few head turners around, the people are generally, well, rougher and gruffer.
The language difference doesn’t help, and I had to re-learn my Cyrillic alphabet in order to read the street and other public signs. But it’s kinda neat, once you get the hang of it. For instance, Nevsky Prospect, the main city artery and shopping thoroughfare, is rendered as Hевский Просрект in Russian.
Together with the parents, I reprised some of the trails I did back in 2000, swinging by the St Issac’s Cathedral, the Kazan Cathedral, the St Nicholas Church and the Church of Spilled Blood, along with a visit to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the tombs of the Romanov Tsars can be found. This time round, we checked out the Menshikov Palace, but it was a palace definitely worth missing.
One of the highlights of this return visit was a trip back to the Hermitage, probably one of the world’s greatest art museums, ranking alongside the Louvre of France in terms of the comprehensiveness of its cultural holdings. On display were sizeable quantities of Old Masters, such as Rembrant and Titian and what about this incomparable Matisse, La Danse, which, with its strong tones, heightens the drama and concentration of the dancers, totally lost in their movements.
Perhaps one reason why my previous visit to St Petersburg had seemed to surreal, so different from my other travels, was that it was a place infused with so much meaning and mysticism, symbolic of the deep and rich culture that is Russia. You get a sense of that right away when you step into a darkened Orthodox church, suffused with incense, replete with iconography, and swarming with the pious and the penitent. Some things seem beyond comprehension, but this return trip has, however, made it more real for me.
Travel Notes: We took a daytime train, the Sibelius, from Helsinki to St Petersburg’s Finland Station, the very station Lenin stepped out from when he made his triumphant arrival in St Petersburg in April 1917. Our hotel was as the Dostoevsky, located on Vladimirsky Prospect, opposite the Vladimir Church. Nice pancakes to be had at Teremok, with a few chains across the city.
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