A hermit would be pretty sad in the Hermitage

Peter the Great

The bus to St. Petersburg stopped for everyone’s passport to be processed at the Estonia border outpost of Narva. It took forever for the very stern guard to compare every single wretched passport picture with every recently wakened, bleary-eyed passenger. She left the bus with the enormous pile of passports and was gone long enough for everyone to start sweating about exactly why it was taking so long. Once we cleared that, we drove about 200 yards and all had to stumble off the bus with all our luggage to be shaken down by the largest German Sheppard I have ever seen. Seriously, he looked like a Sheppard/bear mix. He (and his handler) was apparently satisfied with us and the bus and we were allowed to re-board and resume our journey.

St. Petersburg is really lovely. It is ridiculously full of gorgeous and splendid. You’d have to stay several weeks to even adequately skim the surface. We felt it was too late for the Hermitage after we got settled in and the luggage stowed. The city is very easy to get around and our hotel was very conveniently located right on one of the charming canals that flow through to the Neva. The location was good and the room itself was fine, but the entryway/vestibule was the most horrifying thing ever. No real sign, just a tiny printed notice on a heavily grafittied, scratched and gouged black metal door. Once we got that open, we were really sad. It opened into a dark, dank, smoke and urine scented crumbling stone stairwell. The reception desk was four horror-movie flights up. Special.

Inside the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood

The graffiti is out of control all over these northern cities – If I were spending untold fortunes keeping up and restoring the gorgeous of ages past to get World Heritage status, I would have some fairly Draconian methods of dealing with disaffected jackasses mucking it all up. Just saying.

Anyhow, the trip out to the Peter and Paul fortress restored the tone of everyone mind. We wandered photographing all things as we went. The cathedral houses the remains of almost every czar from Peter the Great on. A less attractive feature was the local crowd enjoying the summer weather – not that we don’t like to see them out having a good time, it is that the not that warm sunshine inspired dozens of hardy Russians to strip to their tighty-whities and bask on the grassy slopes around the fortress. Most of the women had the foresight to bring their swimwear.

After that we roamed the city looking at this and that piece of wonderfulness, all the time working toward the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. It was erected over the site where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. It is breathtakingly lovely and stands out from the more sober elegance of the Baroque and Neo-Classical architecture that dominates the rest of St. Petersburg. The exterior is exquisite, but the interior really makes you feel sure you must be hallucinating – every centimeter in the place is carpeted in gorgeous mosaics. It was badly damaged during WWII and due to misuse and neglect. The state has spent 27 years and vast fortunes painstakingly restoring it. They have done a magnificent job.

We have seen so much work in progress in every city we have visited – it is very gratifying that they cherish and protect their cultural heritage. One thing that amazed us is that in places that have witnessed many of the vicissitudes of fortune – war, famine, disease, and more war and so on – have managed to keep and preserve all these magnificent things.

It took us two full – open to close- days to get through the Hermitage and we had to practically sprint through the special exhibitions (Annie Liebowitz and Henry Moore) to do that. It is not possible to describe the Hermitage – splendor piled on glorious magnificence, topped with exquisiteness and the whole glazed with a rich coating of sublime. It is agonizing. Our only nominally recovered neck muscles were grossly over-taxed by the absurdly phenomenal ceilings in each room. Then there were the floors! It is brutal to house the world’s largest collection of triumphs of human artistic achievement in a space that is oftentimes more marvelous than the work being displayed there.

The fabulous jewelry, decorative arts, furnishings, you get the idea – we did the antiquities and those galleries the first day. We also got the special tickets for the Diamond Room – three galleries of you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me riches. We were practically bleeding gorgeous out of eyeballs and had yet to see the bulk of the paintings! We had hoped to get to Catherine’s Palace and a few other sights, but we had to give two days to the Hermitage; we had seen so little.

One particularly wonderful thing about the Hermitage is the lovely wooden floors – two days of 7 ½ hours on almost non-stop stand and slow walk and nobody had sore feet. Thank you, Catherine the Great!

We managed to get to the Kazan Cathedral, St. Catherine’s (the Armenian one and the Russian Orthodox one), St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and have decadent cakes and tea at the café in the fantastic Singer building.

It's a Michaelangelo!

Slight trauma at the train station when it was discovered that our e-ticket had to be redeemed for “real” tickets and the ticket office had been closed for 2 hours! However, the good people at Russia Rail pitied the stupid Americans and took care of us.

Do svidanya St. Petersburg!

The Last person who tried to see the Hermitage in 2 days