June 7, By Donna

Since Marina did such a thorough job describing the Catherine Palace, I won’t tell you much more about it, other than to say it was built by Elizabeth, not Catherine, in honor of her mother Catherine, who was NOT Catherine the Great, who was actually from Germany, not Russia.  Got it?

One other interesting tidbit …. The amber that Marina describes was not the original.  The original was either destroyed or lost during the war, nobody knows for sure.  It took 30 years and six tons of amber to recreate the whole room from just a few black and white photographs.  I found the restoration project as fascinating as the palace itself! 

After a brief shopping stop (amber, you guessed it), we had lunch at a rather touristy wooden structure that seemed as Bavarian as it was Russian.  The food was good and there was some fun musical entertainment (the poor performers here seem to have to play Lara’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago over and over again).

When we returned to St. Petersburg, we stopped at the memorial and museum about the siege of Leningrad.  The siege lasted 900 days, and it certainly looked awful.  Millions of people starved but in the end, the Russians successfully held off the Nazis, and the city (then called Leningrad) was liberated.  The monument was tastefully done.

 

 Our last tourist stop was the Church On Spilled Blood, one of those marvelous, Russian, multi-domed, carnival-colored, structures.  Now you might think that this is an incorrect preposition, i.e. should it be the Church of Spilled Blood, and Donna just made a typo?  No, in fact, it is actually On the spot where the Emporer Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.  He had freed the serfs (heck, around the same time we freed ours), and obviously some folks were not too happy about that.  Anyway, the church was built right on top of the cobblestones where he was murdered.

The marvelous thing about the church is that it is full of exquisite mosaics.  These took 25 years to create originally, then 25 years to recreate after they were destroyed by the Bolsheviks.  In this country, if the Nazi’s didn’t blow up something, the Bolsheviks did.