On Saint Petersburg22 март 2011

Two weeks ago we took a 4 day trip to Saint Petersburg on a faculty exchange trip at Nancy’s school. The Anglo-American School of Moscow has a sister school: The Anglo-American School of Saint Petersburg. We took a speedy bullet train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. The trip took a comfortable 3 ½ hours and it’s the only way to “fly”. I wish we could get everywhere by train; it was comfortable, easy to get on and off with none of the other hassles you experience when flying.

Saint Petersburg was founded and literally designed by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703 along the Neva River on what was then marshy swamp land. The land where the current city stands was dredged up and fortified all under the direction of Peter the Great.


Saint Petersburg (Петербург) was formerly called Lennigrad (Ленинград) and was Russia’s former capital because Peter hated Mockva. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire the city reverted back to Saint Petersburg in 1991.


Today Saint Petersburg sits beside the Neva River with canals leading from and to it and has been referred to by some as the “Venice of Russia”. The architecture is decidedly European, also a detail the Peter the Great insisted upon. It’s a very walkable city and has the deepest (90 meters) Metro (subway) system in the world.


Walking along the streets of Saint Petersburg “feels European". English speakers are quite comfortable there making it doubly easy to navigate the city.


Peter’s enormous Winter Palace along the river is now home to The Hermitage, a world renowned museum with opulent collections of art by the great masters and other art forms of all types. The interior itself is a work of art and adds a powerful impact as soon as you enter one of six buildings. You could easily spend a week touring all of the buildings and still not see everything.

In the center of the city along a canal is the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. The building is similar in design and style to Saint Basil’s Church on Red Square next to the Kremlin in Moscow (see a previous post). Every inch of the church is covered from top to bottom with intricate mosaic scenes depicting Jesus, his disciples and stories from the Bible. Each stone was hand-cut and assembled creating beautiful mosaics, in themselves fabulous works of art.


If you’re interested, I’ve posted 3 slideshows: one includes images from the city; another from the Hermitage; and the third includes interior and exterior images of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. All can be seen on my site: http://www.andrewmcdonoughphotography.com/ – click on the “RUSSIA” link and scroll down to the last 3 postings. Or, the easiest way to now view these and future shows is to click on these links: http://vimeo.com/38940121; http://vimeo.com/38972067 and http://vimeo.com/38972693. The shows will pop-up in real time and can be viewed with any machine (i.e., PCs or Macs) working on any operating systems.


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