The next day we saw the Peter and Paul fortress, where all the great
Tsars and buried, then actually had some free time and saw St. Isaacs
Cathedral, which I can say without reservation is the most magnificent
building I have ever seen or heard of. The interior was an arrangement of
14 different kinds and colors of marble, all polished and sculpted and
arranged so beautifully that it almost did justice to the processes by
which the earth created them. And every nook and cranny was taken very
special care of so that you just kept discovering more beauty in every
corner. There were also paintings and frescoes and sculptures and mosaics
and icons all around, and at the top of the central dome, a single silver
pigeon with wings spread suspended in air and illuminated by the sun.
The second most beautiful cathedral I've ever seen was the Cathedral of
Spilt Blood,
erected on the site where Alexander II was killed (the man who freed
the serfs a year before Lincoln freed the slaves, and was trying to
instate badly needed reforms when he was blown up by revolutionaries who,
ironically, wanted those reforms but also wanted to get rid of the
institution of Tsardom). The inside was absolutely COVERED in mosaics,
every column and every wall and even the ceiling, just more and more
mosaics, there must have been billions of shards of rock or glass or
whatever they used, in billions of colors, not to mention billions of
man-hours, to make it. But it really was beautiful. And there was a little
shrine at one end with a little marble gazebo over the original
cobblestones were Alex died. And the outside had blue and green and yellow
and white swirly and checkered onion domes and mosaics also. (Funny
story--when Liz and I first got to St. Petersburg after a week of traveling
through Scandinavia, in our first disorienting day in Russia,
we were wandering around, when suddenly we caught sight of the domes of
the Cathedral of Spilt Blood. At the exact same moment, we both gasped and
pointed and looked at each other, and then laughed our butts off, because
we both knew the other had been thinking the exact same thing--that we
were seeing St. Basil's Cathedral at last! Never mind we were 600 miles
from Moscow...)
All together it was a pretty canned and Bing-sponsored and touristy view
of the city, but many moments of beauty nonetheless. Still, I wish I had
time to actually get to know the city. I had a lot of fun two months ago
during the few hours we had in St. Petersburg (after spending three hours
trying to figure out how to get a ticket to Moscow when we didn't speak
the language beyond "Moskva" and "Bilyet," ticket)
just sitting on park benches, wandering the streets, watching ten-year-old
boys playing games with impressively realistic toy guns, etc.
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