St. Pete’s

Saint Petersburg is certainly one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It has been called the Venice of the north, and while I have not been to Venice in my adult life I have been to Paris, and Saint Petersburg is certainly in a similar category. At least as far as beauty goes. The city I am speaking of is of course in Russia and not in Florida, and was founded by Peter the Great as a new “Modern” city from which to rule his empire. I have to say that if you keep a bucket list this city should be on it. We of course were able to stay with some relatives of RG her second cousin by American Genealogy or Aunt according to Russian accounting. Her Aunt/Cousin was very hospitable and her apartment is one of the nicest places we have had to stay in Russia. In an old concrete building housing several hundred apartments you would not have expected much. However the 2 bedroom apartment had nice woodworking, a modern kitchen, new furniture, nice floors, was clean, and very comfortable. It still amazes me that the building can be falling apart on the outside, the elevators can make strange loud clicking noises, halls can be filthy, and then you walk into a very nice apartment. I guess this is due to the lack of ownership, administration, and community group to maintain the building like in the states.

The first think you notice about Saint Petersburg is the attitude. Unlike Moscow where most people seem to be glum and concerned about only there own concerns, people in Saint Petersburg are much more friendly and polite. This is most notable on the metro systems. In Moscow an open seat can cause fights when 5 people rush to fill it. In Saint Petersburg three people would stand around the same seat and wait for the others to take it. Saint Petersburg is also much better maintained in general. The streets are cleaner (at least in the area with the most tourists), old buildings are restored rather than replaced, and the whole city seems to be getting repainted while we were there. It is also much less crowed even though officially it has almost ½ (4.6 million density of 7600/SqKm) the population of Moscow (10 million 9600/SqKM). Though I think Moscow has twice as many people as the OFFICAL numbers.

The buildings in Saint Petersburg are much different than those in most major European cities. For one they generally are not built out of stone. Instead they are built out of brick and covered in plaster. Because of this building style the buildings are much larger, and because of the plaster they have fantastic facades. The buildings are painted bright colors for Europe, mostly green, blue, and yellows, but there are still some brick, brown, and grey buildings from time to time. Also many of the buildings have copper or gold roofs or iron adornments giving each building its own unique character. My favorite was a green building with some rounded glass corners and large greened-iron wire globe. Of course the big attractions in and around the city are the Palaces and Castles of which there are over 25! I don’t know if there is another area in the world with so many places in the world. Most of these now house museums, galleries, or are open as public attractions.

We went to only 3 palaces and 1 castle, though we saw many others. The first palace called Peterhof is a large estate on an Island outside of the city has one of the grandest approaches I ever scene. With dozens of fountains, statues, and a cascading fountain surrounded by grad stairways visitors are led to back entrance from a doc. The main courtyard in the front is also impressive though in true Russian fashion we would have had to pay a second fee to walk around in it, so we settled for the main grounds and the tour of the palace. The second, Catherine’s palace is also outside of the city but this time more of a country estate. It had smaller grounds with more subtle features. A nice like with a small guest house on it, a building for displaying flowers, an interesting brick bridge, some smaller reflecting pools, hedges, a selection of statues, and small fountains were contained on about ½ the area of Peterhof. Interestingly, both palaces had been taken over by the Nazis in WWII and both had been burned to the ground. It took over 30 years to restore them to their glory and attention was paid to every detail.

They were both full of grand halls, amazing wood inlaid floors nicer than even expensive furniture from the time, gold adorned most rooms, and of course there were unique pieces of art work. The wood work in the floors is so good in fact that they make you put soft baggies over your shoes to protect them as you walk around! In some rooms you could find art from the Far East, it seems the Russian Tsars were just as intrigued by that part of the world as the west was. Much of the restoration was done from the original plans and photos were used to try to get things right. We were informed that the hardest part was finding furniture to replace the custom made pieces that had been stolen or burned. My favorite room was a recreation of the famed Amber room, a room aptly named where every square inch was covered by amber. Even doorways, picture frames, fixture, really everything was covered or made from amber. It was amazing. The original room of course was famously stolen during WWII from the Nazis and has yet to be found or accounted for.

The final palace we went to was the Hermitage museum in the Winter Palace. The main building faces both the Neva River on one side and the main square on the other. It is a large green building with statues lining the roof and white trim. This is actually several palaces attached to one another turned into a very large art gallery. It contains several receiving halls, an amazing stairway, and a couple of throne rooms (one that was never used), a large golden bird cage containing a gold statue of a bird, rooms of carved marble, along with a hall of Russian heroes. We did not get a chance to see it all as our feet literally hurt too much to go on from walking around looking at everything. The Palace itself was always used for receptions and state business and never had any royals living in it. An attached smaller palace was instead used as a residence by Anne of Russia.

The palaces in the city are simply astounding. So much so that I will have to finish writing about St. Petersburg in another entry as this post is already to long I think.