If cities were colours...

If cities were colours, Moscow would be a solid brick red, St.Petersburg a delicate mint-green.

Or so I mused, as I stood next to the towering Alexander column at Palace Square, awed by the beautiful mint green-white-gold exteriors of the Winter Palace, the home of the Tsars, and now part of the expansive Hermitage Museum.

Or wait…let me start from the beginning.

Our train rolled into St. Petersburg just as we had polished off the last morsels of a breakfast of blini (Russian pancakes) and kasha (buckwheat porridge) in our compact coupe on the Moscow-St.Petersburg Express.

An imposing bust of Peter the Great greeted us as we crossed over to the city metro from the train station and embarked upon the mini-adventure of procuring day passes.

Sankt Pieterburkh under Peter the Great, the Tsar who built this city of canals from the marshes of the Neva river after the Great Northern Wars with Sweden.  Petrograd during the Great War, when the people rejected the old German-sounding name. Leningrad under the soviets, to celebrate the father of their newly-adopted political philosophy. St.Petersburg to the rest of the world. Or just Piter. All of these names evoke heard memories of endless White Nights. Of fairytale castles and Tsars and princes (usually called Ivan) who rise to save the day. This Western end of the old Tsardom has seen more than its fair share of excitement in its (relatively) short history.

The soaring spire at
Ss.Peter & Paul Cathedral

Moscow was born at the wooden fortress that occupied the current Kremlin site, and St.Petersburg at Rabbit Island out of which was built the formidable Peter and Paul Fortress. A bright summer morning found us at Zayachy (Hare) Island, exploring the cathedrals, boathouse, workshops and guardhouse – many of which now house museums. The Fortress, ironically, was never required for the defence of the empire from a potential Swedish invasion- instead it became infamous as a political prison. The entrance to the fortress, St.Peter’s Gate, hinted at the very European nature of the structures that were housed inside. The Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul was our first stop:  the cathedral itself designed by Italian architects, but the icon screen, of course, could only be the work of expert Russian woodcarvers and gilders. Flags and banners, relics of the victory in the founding wars, were slung from the walls inside. As I craned my neck to look at the spire soaring high into the cloudless sky, it was only too easy to believe my audioguide which informed me that the spire was an easy target of German airstrikes in World War II, and consequently had to be camouflaged to avoid detection.

We took the seats conveniently placed right outside the cathedral and on cue from those around us, settled down to enjoy the warmth of the lovely summer afternoon, the sweeping views of the fortress bastions and the audio guide telling us of the various uses to which the fortress had been put. Apart from serving as a tomb for the royals, a high security prison and the site of Tsar Peter’s naval experiments, the fortress, we were told, was once home to a laboratory that saw pioneering moments in Russian rocket technology. So off we went to the museum that stands at the site, to trace the growth of Russia’s journey from experiments in gas dynamics to the search for the perfect space fuel. An entire panel was devoted to the space theorist Tsiolkovsky, whose ideas on space exploration put forth in the late 19^th century were, we discovered, far, far ahead of his time. For context, he developed a theory of jet propulsion in the 1880s, and wrote a book titled ‘Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices’ long before the idea of the commercial aircraft was even conceived and inspired many later day rocket pioneers such as Robert Goddard.

Next up was Nevsky Prospekt, the arterial road of the city, which counts amongst its impressive lineup centuries-old malls and stores, picture-perfect cathedrals, parks, monuments and the characteristic bridges that serve as gateways for tours of its canals. After a visit to Kazan Cathedral, built in the likeness of St.Peter’s at the Vatican, we headed towards the Church of our Saviour on Spilled blood. 

Church of our Saviour on Spilled blood

As we crossed the Griboedov bridge to catch our first glimpse of this landmark structure, we were struck by its resemblance to St.Basil’s. As a monument to Tsar Alexander the Liberator, this church, of course, had to be Russian in its design. Built at the site where Tsar Alexander was mortally wounded by an anarchist, this church stood out for its Russian style that would be more at home in Moscow. A shrine studded with precious stones marks the precise site of the assassination. Alexander was known for his reforms, particularly for freeing the serfs in 1861. More famously, it was he who sold Alaska to the States in 1867.  We were dazzled by the interiors swathed in mosaic work- every inch of the walls, pillars and ceiling was wrapped in the most intricate and strikingly colourful mosaic painting representing many Biblical scenes.

Mosaic art at the Church

Not for nothing is St.Petersburg called the ‘Venice of the North’. Filled with hundreds of bridges and embankments, criss-crossed by a network of canals, water to St.Petersburg is almost as essential as it is to Venice. A tour by its canals is most rewarding in the white nights of its literally never-ending summer days, we had been told, and we proceeded to make the most of the late summer evening sunshine by getting on to a boat at the Anichkov most (bridge) on Nevsky Prospekt, spending an enjoyable hour drifting from island to island, spotting cathedrals, palaces and gardens.

Where Moscow is all office blocks and essentially Russian onion domes, St.Petersburg is all classical palaces and European spires. Moscow is as old as Russia itself, and certainly older than its Tsardom. St. Petersburg is as old as the Romanov Tsars’ fascination with Europe and with empire-building. Moscow is an amalgam of many kinds of Russian-ness across the ages. St. Petersburg is a window to Europe, to nostalgia of an imperial past. If cities were colours, Moscow would be a solid brick red, St. Petersburg a delicate mint-green.

Mint-green and white and gold: Winter Palace

Or so I mused, as I stood next to the towering Alexander column at Palace Square the following day, awed by the beautiful mint green-white-gold exteriors of the Winter Palace, the home of the Romanov dynasty, and now part of the expansive Hermitage Museum.

The royals had lavished Italian architecture on this palace, studded it with sculptures and decorative arts from across the world, and bathed its walls with paintings by every known master. What Empress Catherine II had begun as a collection of paintings over 200 years ago has now expanded to include every form of collectible (art, coins, books, tools, banners) from all corners of the world housed in palace bulidings whose spectacular architecture vies with the displays themselves for attention.One of the most arresting features of the palace was the abundance of the towering sculptures of Atlantes, or pillars in the form of men that appear to support the ceiling.  As we fanned out across its large spaces, going from Roman heroes to Greek temples, from Egyptian relics to Russian pavilion halls, from Italian loggias to Buddhist frescos, from massive urns and vases to majestic stairways, I felt exactly as I had at the Louvre, overwhelmed, exhilarated, doggedly keeping up my spirited venture to take in as many great gulps of its vast array of exhibits as I could in the precious little time spent inside. 

Hermitage - the world in brief 

After walking many miles through these seemingly endless caverns, imagine our astonishment on finding out that this was only a fraction of the collection, and that there was much, much more kept aside in the Hermitage Storage facility in another part of the city!

 Imagining an eventful past at Palace Square

When we could walk no more, we came back to the late evening sunshine of the Palace Square, surprised by its near-emptiness, where I gave myself to imagining that day in a long ago December when demonstrators were shot down as they surged into a square in protest. 
Or that day in this very square when a mob swept in to capture the Winter Palace, tossed out a monarchy, shrugged off a War and flung the country headlong into Revolution.   
Or those 900 days when a down but definitely not out Leningrad willed itself through a siege by collective superhuman effort, valiantly refusing to surrender.

Old head on young shoulders, indeed.


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