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Niko picked us up at our hotel and drove us in near-perfect weather to the Piskaroyovskoe Cemetery with its memorial statue of a grieving Mother Russia and row upon row of raised mounds where around 300,000 citizens of the City are buried in mass graves marked only by their year of death. They died mostly of starvation during the 872-day Nazi Siege of Leningrad (1941 -1944). In all, around 1,500,000 people died in what has been described as “the most lethal siege in world history.”
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| Entrance to the Cemetery |
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| Rows of mass graves |
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| Mother Russia |
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| Niko & Bob |
On the way back, we stopped at a square honoring Lenin. It's water fountains are timed to rise and fall with piped-in music. Stew took a photo there of Bob and Niko to go with the one that Bob had taken earlier of Niko, Karin and Stew.
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| Karin, Niko & Stew |
Niko dropped us off at The Church of Of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, an incredibly ornate structure built in the late 19th Century mostly with funds donated by the royal family to memorialize the spot where Alexander II was assassinated. The family opted to look backward to earlier styles of Russian churches, and they spent massive amounts of money decorating almost every inch of the interior with amazing mosaics that include rare stones and gold. The opulence is overwhelming.
Amazingly, we still had energy left to visit the Russian Museum with its spectacular collection of 19th and 20th Century paintings that broke from the earlier Classic tradition of painting mythological and heroic subjects in order to portray real Russian people and scenes. The paintings evolved from realistic to partly impressionistic, but, as Karin pointed out, they illustrate just how vast the gulf was between the real people of Russia and the opulent world of the Tsars who led them and could lavish so much money on the church we'd just seen.
By then, having had more than enough history and culture, we slipped into an oasis of 19th century calm by having high tea at the Grand Hotel Europe complete with live harp music. This was a touch of opulence that we decided we'd earned.
