A Churchy Sort of Day

It's almost impossible to tear yourself away from the hostel before nine especially when it's still dark outside. Today however we managed to get going reasonably early and jumped on a Metro and headed up to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. It's a working monastery but that wasn't the big draw. The bigger draw is actually in the cemetary at the front of the monastery.

All number of writers, actors, musicians and composers are interred there. Amongst the tombs we saw were Dostoyevsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Mussogorsky and other luminaries including Pushkin's mistress and Renaissance man extraordinaire Mikhail Lomonsov.

After taking a peak inside the monastery we headed back downtown to check out the Church of the Spilt Blood which marked the site of the assasination of Alexander II. This onion domed Russian orthodox church is definitely a local landmark but we first baulked at paying the admission fee. We got a sneak peak at the mosaics though and we were hooked.

Maybe thirty metres high, every square millimetre of this massive building, including the towering domes, was covered with jaw droppingly beautiful mosaics depicting various scenes from the New Testament. On each of the pillars were depictions of various Saints.

After the Church of the Spilt Blood we popped into the souvineir market where I scored a Soviet-era, (or authentic looking knock off), Zippo and a writers matroyshka doll feauturing, amongst others, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy. You can also buy ones with Osama bin Laden on the outside (Saddam, Gaddafi, Arafat etc. on the inside), Harry Potter ones, George Bush ones, and even Russian leadership ones starting with Putin and moving backward through Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Krushchev etc.

With dark descending (what do you expect it was 2:55?) we made our way over to Falconet's near legendary statue The Bronze Horseman. Created at the behest of Catherine the Great, it depicts the grand monarch on a rearing stallion that is crushing a serpent beneath it's hoof. It took twelve years to make and by the time it was completed it's creator, Falconet, had become so disillusioned with the project that he upped stumps and headed back to Paris leaving his apprentice to finish the job. The statue sits in a lovely park overlooking the Neva so we got a wonderful view of the fabulous river as the day darkened.

Finally to finish off the day we walked up the top of another cathedral, St. Isaac's, and got a 360 degree panorama of the city as the night lights started coming on, illuminating the multiplicity of spires that decorate the city skyline.

We eventually made it back to our hostel, after a detour through Dostoyevskaya to pick up some groceries, at about 8:00 whereby I met some English travellers returning home and proceeded to guzzle the bottle of Vodka I'd just purchased.