St. Petersburg

Saturday 23rd July 2011

'Vodohod' berths for cruise ships and hyrofoils on the north bank of the River Neva at Utkina Zavod, St. Petersburg.

During the night, we completed our crossing of Lake Lagoda and entered the River Neva to complete the last 50 km of our marathon journey from Moscow. It was noticeable that, whilst the industrial sites we'd passed on our trip had been run-down, we passed some modern premises as we approached St. Petersburg. We came to an area bristling with new high-rise apartments of the type you can find in any major city and passed under a modern cable-stayed road bridge which I'd cross a number of times during our stay in St. Petersburg. On our right, there were a number of moored River Cruise ships, all flying the red 'Vodohod' pennant and a collection of hyrofoils. It appeared that we were at our destination. I'm afraid it was a while before I had grasped that we were at the newer river terminal of Utkina Zavod on the north bank (not shown on the map I had) rather than the older terminal a short distance downstream on the south bank. We manoevred together with another river cruise ship: it seemed to be a case of one out, one in.

We moored at the River Port on time at 8.0 a.m. and disembarked at 9.0 a.m. to visit the Hermitage Museum. Our passengers made the usual procession through other moored ships and the landing stage to reach a waiting 'Meteor' class hydrofoil. Once we were all distributed around the three cabins of the hydrofoil, we roared off downstream to the centre of the city. It certainly seemed a great way to reach the museum because we disembarked at a landing stage right opposite the main entrance to the museum, merely waiting for the pedestrian lights to turn green before crossing the busy road en masse to join the crowds already milling around.

Our entry had been timed for 10.0 a.m. (when the museum opened) to avoid the worst of the crowds. Although, unusually, photography is permitted in the museum, bags and bulky coats are not so we made use of the cloakroom before passing through the electronic turnstiles. The original Hermitage was built to house Catherine the Second's collection of artworks but the State Hermitage Museum now also incorporates the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre. About three million exhibits are displayed in over three hundred rooms - whatever you've read about this world-famous museum doesn't prepare you for the sensory overload of being there. The quality and breadth of the exhibits quite knocked me out.

The Armorial Hall, designed in 1839, was intended for formal receptions and balls.

Money has been lavishly expended in returning the buildings to their original grandeur, a breath-taking amalgam of baroque and classical. We made our way up the main staircase of the Winter Palace, originally used by Ambassadors being given audiences in various state rooms and toured a number of the main rooms with our guide, Dmitri. Dmitri's style in rushing us around the major exhibits so as to give us some free time to re-visit places of particular interest was not very popular with some members of the group I was with. Needless to say, the two and a half hours we spent here is nowhere near enough time - two and a half weeks might be more appropriate. My pictures taken in the State Museum are here. Be warned, some of these pictures are dreadful - the low light, the continual press of other visitors, the shortness of time and, yes, my sheer excitement conspired to produce rather disappointing results.

Around 12.30 p.m. we left the Hermitage and boarded a number of waiting coaches which drove all the ship’s passengers to the 'Academy' restaurant nearby. Here, we enjoyed a set 4-course lunch. There was a little time to walk in the gardens opposite the former Stock Exchange (now the Naval Museum), flanked by the two red-painted Rostrol Columns before boarding the coaches for a City Tour with various stops for visits or photographic opportunities. We spent some time in the Peter and Pault Fortress and marvelled at the restoration of the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral. We stopped to wonder at the elaborate exterior of the Church on the Spilled Blood. The inside has the most intricate mosaics but there was insufficient time to queue to visit the interior. The church was built to mark the place where Alexander II was fatally injured by a bomb in 1881. Construction of the Church and its mosaics took from 1883 to 1907. Despite the church's rather gruesome origins, we saw two newly-wed couples being photographed in its precincts.

Many sights we were only able to take in from the coach, such as the Kazan Cathedral. This Church was built between 1801 and 1811 (during the Napoleonic Campaigns) and is now regarded as a monument to the valour of the Russian army. The church is flanked by two massive curved colonnades said to be inspired by the Vatican. The present Saint Isaac's Cathedral, the fourth to stand on the site, was built between 1818 and 1858. We saw the Admiralty building, made a brief photographic stop at the Mariinsky Palace (built between 1839 and 1844 and now occupied by the City Council) and saw a number of the city's many canals. Each of the canals seemed to have a procession of trip boats of various sizes but, to my surprise, some of them didn't seem very well patronised. Another stop was made at the Smolny Monastery. This was built between 1748 and 1769 in baroque style to the design of Bartholomeo Francesco Rastrelli. Here, we saw two young men with their friends, apparently having made (I presume) a civil partnership.

This was our last stop and the coaches took us directly back to our ship. The weather had been very hot and I think most of the passengers were exhausted by the time we arrived back at the ship at 6.0 p.m.

My pictures of our arrival at St. Petersburg and then of our City Tour in the afternoon are here.

Pictures of the River Terminal are here.

Sivirstroy

Friday 22nd July 2011

When I got up, the ship had already left Lake Onega and was sailing downstream on the Svir River. Near Podporozhye we entered the Upper Svir Lock adjacent to the Verkhne-Svirskaya Hydro-electric plant opened in 1951.

Verkhne-Svirskaya Hydro-electric plant.

Having negotiated this lock, we continued downstream. On our right, near Uslanka, we saw a massive stockyard with around twelve overhead cranes serving the various bays. As we passed, I counted only one bay being used for logs and one or two bays with coal. It must have been a very different sight in its heyday.

Large stockyard with Overhead Travelling Cranes.

Once more, the forests closed in on both sides of the river, pierced by the occasional small village. The landing stage of Mandrogy came up on our left. Four river cruise ships were berthed, two by two. There were some large wooden buildings, including one still under construction. A few people were boating or swimming in the river. A 'typical Russian Village' was re-created there in 1996, with hotels, restaurants, museums and craft workshops. Mandrogy forms a calling-point for the cruise boats, but we sailed past. Soon, the hydro-electric power station at the Lower Svir Lock came into view but we altered course to port to bring us alongside a large barge which had been modified for use as a landing stage. It appeared that we were to enjoy our own 'retail opportunities' before passing through the lock. The area between the river and a public road had been quite nicely prepared with a series of cafes and souvenir stalls. I'm told the gifts were of good quality and fairly reasonably prices but I'm afraid I react fairly badly to these contrived experiences and I quickly headed out of the 'craft village' for the public road.

The road to the left seemed to head inland so I turned right along a residential road parallel to the river bank, walking in the direction of the Lock and Power Station. The village of Sivirstroy has a population of around 1,000 and seemed to be a reasonably prosperous place. A fairly grand villa was under construction on the river side of the road. I passed the war memorial which was festooned with wreathes and came to a small picnic area looking towards the power station. A couple of small boats were presumably used by amateur fishermen.

A picnic area on the river bank at Sivirstory.

At the end of the village, a track lead off to the Power Station and what looked like the boiler room for a district heating system. A solitary lady was waiting at a bus shelter. Beyond, there was a vista of trees. I turned onto another residential road, running roughly parallel to the road I'd just taken. I passed two unidentified public buildings, the church and an infant school (quite deserted - Summer Holidays? I wondered). There were a few people about but it was very peaceful and the tree-lined road with neat brick and stucco houses, each with its own garden looked very pleasant.

Sivirstroy.

I passed what must have been a civilian air raid shelter. One of the doors was standing open but I didn't summon up the coutage to explore further. By this time, I was close to my starting point so I made a brief foray on the road heading inland. A picturesque lake lay on my left with a broad sandy beach, with lots of Russians enjoyed the sunny weather. On my right, partly hidden by trees, a small medical centre and a rather nondescript 5-story block of apartments. There were bus lay-bys on both sides of the road and then trees, as far as I could see.

On the way back to the ship, I passed an impressive statue to S.M. Kirov. Once again, I had to write down the Cyrillic characters and ask one of the shipboard guides to 'Latinise' it to 'Kirov'. She claimed not to know of the subject of the statue, but the dates on the statue suggest it commemorates Sergei Kirov, who rose to high rank but was assasinated in 1934. Like all Russian history, the tale is convoluted and bloody - see 'The Kirov Murder'.

I came back to the riverbank just upstream of the ship, where I found a few dwelling in a more traditional style, then I returned to the ship. At 4.0 p.m. we slipped our moorings and entered the Lower Svir Lock. This was the last lock on our journey. As we passed through the lock, I had closer views of the adjacent Nizhne-Svirskaya hydro-electric station which was completed in 1934. These Stalin-era engineering achievements are impressive, but it's sobering to remember that most (all?) were completed using forced labour.

We passed Lodeynoe Pole, with a passenger ferry at the landing stage and numerous apartment blocks and run-down engineering works. The peace was shattered for about ten minutes by a young man on a jet-ski who 'buzzed' our ship, showing off in a way common to young men the world over.

Later in the evening, we entered Lake Ladoga (which is Europe's biggest lake). During the night, we crossed Lake Ladoga and entered the Neva River which would take us to St. Petersburg.

My pictures around Sivirstroy are here.

My pictures taken from Sivirstroy to Lake Lagoda are here.

Kizhi Island

Thursday 21st July 2011

Lake Onega is the second largest lake in Europe and its shape is said to resemble a clawed lobster. The lake contains over 1300 islands, one of which is Kizhi. It took us some hours the cross this inland sea, passing various river cruise ships and two speeding hydrofoils.

Eventually, we spotted a small wooden church on a nearby island. We were approaching Kizhi! For the first time, two house pennants were flown from the flagstaff at the bow, representing the partners – the red Vodohod flag above the blue AMA Waterways flag. As we approached the landing stage the outline of the very improbable Transfiguration Cathedral came into view. And so did three river cruisers, all similar to our ship, moored three abreast at the single landing pontoon. Once again, I realised that this wasn’t likely to be a quiet, spiritual experience.

Getting ashore here proved more of an ordeal than anywhere else on the trip. A number of mooring lines were run across to the outermost ship of the three, but the captain was dissatisfied with one wire rope which had been run on a long diagonal between the ships and the two crews had to re-position it. Meanwhile, our passengers were waiting to get off. The reception area on the main deck was crammed, with overflows sitting on the stairs up to the next deck above and the one above that. Eventually people began to move out and at last I was able to descend to the main deck, exchange my credit card sized electronic Room Key for a Boarding Pass, and step across to the next ship.

The next ship to us was the ‘Mikhail Tanich’. I didn’t know that at the time, because the ship’s name only seemed to appear in Cyrillic characters. On my return to our ship, I asked our cruise staff to translate. They said he was a popular songwriter and musician, now fairly old (in fact, he died in 2008, according to the photograph of him displayed on the ship named after him). Having walked through their reception area, we crossed to the reception area of the ‘Ivan Bunin’ (a poet and writer, he was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature - see Wikipedia), then the reception area of the ‘Leo Tolstoy’ (writer of novels such as 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina' who, in later life became a moral thinker and social reformer - see Wikipedia). Finally, we reached the landing stage. Looking back, I was horrified to see a fifth ship approaching the landing stage, but I didn’t see what happened to that. Some of our guides were waiting on the landing stage but, because of the crush, some had moved further onto the island so there was reasonable chaos before we were sorted into groups and passed through the entrance gate to ‘Kizhi Federal Open Air Museum of Cultural History and Architecture’.

The improbable-looking Transubstantiation Cathedral on Kizhi.

I learned that “The Kizhi Architectural Ensemble is a UNESCO World-Heritage listed site”. The Transubstantiation Cathedral of wooden construction built here in 1714 is regarded as the star attraction. You can only view it from outside while restoration work is being carried out. Apparently this work has already been in progress for a number of years. An unsightly steel ‘corset’ has been erected around the outside to stop the building from collapsing – it wasn’t clear whether this was an interim stage or the permanent solution. But the 22 fairytale domes still give the building a remarkable appearance. In addition to this remarkable survivor, a number of wooden buildings typical of the region have been re-erected on Kizhi to form an open-air museum of wooden architecture. Materials used are mainly pine and, for roof shingles, aspen. Although these species were used for their long life, quite a lot of new material has been added during restoration. We only looked at the buildings at one end of the island adjacent to the landing stage but there are more buildings spread over the other end of the island which would require more time to explore.

Apart from the 190 of my ship’s visitors, we were sharing the island with all the visitors from the other ships, so it was quite hard to take a picture which didn’t include other people. In a not altogether successful attempt to avoid congestion, our guide changed the order in which we viewed the buildings but we still had to stand around waiting for previous parties to move on.

The house of the peasant Oshevney, re-erected on Kizhi.

The house of the peasant Oshevney dating from 1876 was re-erected on the island in the 1950s. Each room had been been furnished to illustrate the way of life of the people, but if our guide spent too long explaining, then one of the museum attendants would shoo us all into the next room. The house is complete with a separate barn and bathhouse. Many of the exhibits, like the tiny 18th century Chapel of the Archangel Michael (where a bellringer in the tiny belfry played a tune by pulling strings, as we’d seen demonstrated in Yaroslavl), the Church of the Intercession and an odd-looking wooden windmill could only be viewed from outside.

The rather odd-looking Windmill with the Chapel of the Archangel Michael on the right.

However, we went inside the 18th century Church of the Intercession, dwarfed by its near neighbour the Transubstantiation Cathedral. This building is also a ‘native’ of the island, being used for services until 1937 and, since 1994, functioning again as a church.

Near the Transubstantiation Cathedral, I noticed a second small landing stage with an awful modern roof which I guessed was for arriving VIPs. When I visited, a Fire Boat was moored there. Fire is a particular hazard for a wooden museum: the Transubstantiation Cathedral has a Fire Main run around the outside.

By this time, the island was noticeably quieter as some of the ships had departed. We returned to our ship and enjoyed dinner as we re-traced our route and sailed south-east back across Lake Onega.

Kizhi has its own website. The English homepage is here.

My pictures of Kizhi Island are here.