Petersburg Sightseeing

Petersburg

After attending the various classes and activites at the VedaLife festival in Lahta, it was time for some sightseeing here in Petersburg.

Our intrepid driver Navin K. drove us to the city center of Saint Petersburg.  This northern seaport was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as a gateway to the West.

The Alexander column watches over the Winter Palace of the Tsar and the Hermitage Museum. 

We began our walk near the ¨Singer¨Building which houses a book store and a restaurant with a view of the city. 

The ladies shopped at different stores taking a look at tea sets, samovars, matroshkas, and other sourvenirs. They mostly window-shopped without stopping to buy.

While at little more than 300 years old Petersburg is a young city, it is filled with striking architecture. This is a statue of one of the generals who had some success against Napoleon, I think it´s Kuznetzov.

This is the local parliamentary house for Petersburg.

The nearby cathedral belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917,  the Russian Orthodox Church was an integral part of the Tsarist state, sharing power with the army and the royalty as the official religion of Russia. After the religion, the church was surpressed for nearly a hundred years. Now it is enjoying a resurgence. 

Orthodox churches are filled with Icons of the different saints and patriarchs of the church. Prominent among these are Saint Nicholas and Saint Gregory. 

After visiting the central Cathedral we moved on. 

Russians love books. We decided to have tea at the Singer book store. There we perused volumes of poetry and communed with the great minds in Russian literary pantheon. There was Pushkin and Gogol, Chekhov and Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Joseph Brodsky offering their observations through poetry and prose. 

I bought a volume of Mandelstam for a translator friend, Pushkin for a scholar I know, and Brodsky for a modern thinker.  It was Osip Mandelstam who commented, "Only in Russia s poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

Later we took a boat excursion and wound our way leisurely through the quiet canals in the shade of linden trees on our way to the Church of the Savior, On Blood. In this way, we wandered the sunny streets of Saint Petersburg.