Chapter 4 Saint Petersburg, Russia September 2019
We are staying at the Alexander House hotel or Inn here in Saint Petersburg. It is a beautiful place and has the feel of living in one's own home. With only 20 rooms it is, in fact, a family home converted and renovated back to the style it had when it was built. Our room is huge with a ceiling of 5 meters with huge wood beams supporting a painted ceiling.
Yesterday we visited the Tsar's castle on the sea called Peterhof. It is about 10 miles outside the city and on the shores of the Baltic Sea. It was a rainy and cold day and there were masses of people lining up to visit the place. I have never seen so many Chinese people in one place except in Red Square in Beijing. Unbelievable masses. Luckily for us, our guide had booked special tickets which allowed us to jump all the cues and move ahead of the waiting lines. There is no way any tourist can visit these palaces on their own. The only way to get to see these places is to have a guide, preferably a private guide like we have had who purchases special entries and gets one in quickly. Otherwise one can cue for 4 to 6 hours with no guarantee that one will get in before closing. And this is the case now, in the autumn. I can only shudder to think about how things are in the high summer season when cruise ships are pouring thousands in every day and masses of tourists are arriving by air and rail at the same time. St Petersburg gets some 8 to 9 million tourists a year, twice the local population.
The Peterhof was almost totally destroyed in the war and only 20% of the inside has been restored while 100% of the exterior has been restored. The sheer size of this building and the amount of gold on the outside and inside is absolutely astounding. And this reconstruction work was done by the communist, soviet, socialist government.
The visit takes one through some 20 rooms, one more opulent than the other. The architect of most of the palaces in this city was done by the same one who did Rundale in Latvia I reported on in the last chapter. One can see the similarity. They are the same huge 6-meter high tile ovens used for heating the rooms (Kacheloeffen, in German) as one sees in Rundale. Originally, these were imported from Holland and the tiles carry the traditional Dutch drawings. We found out from our wonderful guide Maria Smolentseva, whom we highly recommend (nevabreeze@gmail.com) that the ovens in both Rundale as well as in Peterhof and Catherine's palaces were redone by Russian artists. They are all handpainted in Delft blue on white and are very impressive.
The Peterhof castle and most of the other Tsar palaces are such pompous places that are over the top. The Russian Tsars were clearly suffering from complexes and wanted to prove that they were bigger and stronger and richer and more European than the Europeans. As I walked through these opulent gold decorated rooms, I could not help to think that this was done by tsars who were keeping the peasants and city people poor and hungry and at the end also pushed them into WW1 without worrying about how many were being slaughtered. It is hardly surprising that Lenin and his crew were able to convince people that they would live better under their Communist regime using the cry; "Bread, Land, and Peace". History shows that none of those happened and the tsars surely did not do a lot to make people want to continue under their regime. Tragic history but we move on.
The really impressive facets of the Peterhof are the waterworks on the rear side of the palace. Some fountains shoot up 7 meters and water which flows down some 20 large levels into a canal that flows into the see a kilometer away. The pressure for all of this comes from the water flowing down from hills behind the palace which come with enough pressure to raise the water fountains. These fountains start each day at 11 am. We got there just about that time and when one looked down into the gardens below there must have been 5000 people with umbrellas standing to watch the water show to start.
Some pictures I took of Peterhof are below:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/vAeW4vQitq9wdHGa9
In the afternoon, we visited Catherine's summer palace. This was occupied and destroyed by the invading German army in the second world war. The palace has been partially rebuilt and is a beautiful piece of architecture as shown by the pictures below
Pictures from the Catherine Palace are at
https://photos.app.goo.gl/zfA4KFf6iYEjqmTm9
The next morning we were off to see the Hermitage museum, which used to be the winter residence of the Tsars. It is a huge collection of buildings with so much art collected by the tsars that it would take years to visit the whole complex. It is another case of excess by the tsars who preferred to build and collect vast buildings and art pieces rather than use their funding to improve the lives of their people. One can only wonder how these people could justify this behaviour and one is not surprised that their downfall was quick and viscious. I show below some pictures of and in the Hermitage:
Pictures from the Hermitage are at
https://photos.app.goo.gl/S4vxH2yqJoqanJqJ6
Yesterday we visited the Tsar's castle on the sea called Peterhof. It is about 10 miles outside the city and on the shores of the Baltic Sea. It was a rainy and cold day and there were masses of people lining up to visit the place. I have never seen so many Chinese people in one place except in Red Square in Beijing. Unbelievable masses. Luckily for us, our guide had booked special tickets which allowed us to jump all the cues and move ahead of the waiting lines. There is no way any tourist can visit these palaces on their own. The only way to get to see these places is to have a guide, preferably a private guide like we have had who purchases special entries and gets one in quickly. Otherwise one can cue for 4 to 6 hours with no guarantee that one will get in before closing. And this is the case now, in the autumn. I can only shudder to think about how things are in the high summer season when cruise ships are pouring thousands in every day and masses of tourists are arriving by air and rail at the same time. St Petersburg gets some 8 to 9 million tourists a year, twice the local population.
The Peterhof was almost totally destroyed in the war and only 20% of the inside has been restored while 100% of the exterior has been restored. The sheer size of this building and the amount of gold on the outside and inside is absolutely astounding. And this reconstruction work was done by the communist, soviet, socialist government.
The visit takes one through some 20 rooms, one more opulent than the other. The architect of most of the palaces in this city was done by the same one who did Rundale in Latvia I reported on in the last chapter. One can see the similarity. They are the same huge 6-meter high tile ovens used for heating the rooms (Kacheloeffen, in German) as one sees in Rundale. Originally, these were imported from Holland and the tiles carry the traditional Dutch drawings. We found out from our wonderful guide Maria Smolentseva, whom we highly recommend (nevabreeze@gmail.com) that the ovens in both Rundale as well as in Peterhof and Catherine's palaces were redone by Russian artists. They are all handpainted in Delft blue on white and are very impressive.
The Peterhof castle and most of the other Tsar palaces are such pompous places that are over the top. The Russian Tsars were clearly suffering from complexes and wanted to prove that they were bigger and stronger and richer and more European than the Europeans. As I walked through these opulent gold decorated rooms, I could not help to think that this was done by tsars who were keeping the peasants and city people poor and hungry and at the end also pushed them into WW1 without worrying about how many were being slaughtered. It is hardly surprising that Lenin and his crew were able to convince people that they would live better under their Communist regime using the cry; "Bread, Land, and Peace". History shows that none of those happened and the tsars surely did not do a lot to make people want to continue under their regime. Tragic history but we move on.
The really impressive facets of the Peterhof are the waterworks on the rear side of the palace. Some fountains shoot up 7 meters and water which flows down some 20 large levels into a canal that flows into the see a kilometer away. The pressure for all of this comes from the water flowing down from hills behind the palace which come with enough pressure to raise the water fountains. These fountains start each day at 11 am. We got there just about that time and when one looked down into the gardens below there must have been 5000 people with umbrellas standing to watch the water show to start.
Some pictures I took of Peterhof are below:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/vAeW4vQitq9wdHGa9
In the afternoon, we visited Catherine's summer palace. This was occupied and destroyed by the invading German army in the second world war. The palace has been partially rebuilt and is a beautiful piece of architecture as shown by the pictures below
Pictures from the Catherine Palace are at
https://photos.app.goo.gl/zfA4KFf6iYEjqmTm9
The next morning we were off to see the Hermitage museum, which used to be the winter residence of the Tsars. It is a huge collection of buildings with so much art collected by the tsars that it would take years to visit the whole complex. It is another case of excess by the tsars who preferred to build and collect vast buildings and art pieces rather than use their funding to improve the lives of their people. One can only wonder how these people could justify this behaviour and one is not surprised that their downfall was quick and viscious. I show below some pictures of and in the Hermitage:
Pictures from the Hermitage are at
https://photos.app.goo.gl/S4vxH2yqJoqanJqJ6
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