St. Petersburg was never on my bucket list. It just happened. When I joined an all-women group on a Baltic cruise, I was eager to visit the Scandinavian capital cities of Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki, and lukewarm about St. Petersburg. Our cruise ship, the Celebrity Constellation, set off from Amsterdam one summer morning and after several days, one particularly stormy night and many delightful stopovers, docked at this Russian port at the head of the Gulf of Finland. I was told the place is inaccessible in winter as the sea freezes. At 60°N latitude, what else can one expect? Well, from my point of view, it was freezing right then!
We braved the cold winds and continuous drizzle all through our two-day sojourn in this incomparably beautiful city. With its exquisite old-world buildings, sprawling boulevards, meandering canals and summer blooms, this one-time refuge of the Russian tsars, sometimes called the Venice of the North, holds many charms for the intrepid traveler.
Named after its founder Peter the Great, it straddles the River Neva and was known as Petrograd at the time of the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks renamed it Leningrad and when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was re-christened St. Petersburg. By then it had been the capital and cultural centre of Russia for nearly two centuries. Anna Pavlova, the ballerina, Boris Spassky, the chess grandmaster, and renowned authors Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand were born in this city apart from the country’s President Vladimir Putin.
We spent several hours at the Hermitage Museum, housed in the Winter Palace complex built by the ill-fated Romanov tsars. The spectacular antiquities numbering three million reminded me of the Louvre in Paris and the Egyptian museum in Cairo. The other major attraction for tourists here is the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. This Russian Orthodox church looks like something out of a fairytale with its multicoloured façade and onion domes — but has a dark history, we’re told.
It was built at the spot where Tsar Alexander II, the man who sold Alaska to the United States, was mortally wounded in a grenade attack in 1881. The interior of the church is a virtual museum of mosaics with intricately wrought biblical themes. Closed down by the Bolsheviks for decades, the church was used as a mortuary during World War II and later as a warehouse for potatoes. Today it is more of a showpiece than a place of worship.
Another interesting place of visit is the Peterhof Palace and garden complex. It mimics the opulent splendour of the French Palace of Versailles with its vast swathes of gold leaf decorations, manicured gardens, impressive statues, majestic fountains and a Grand Cascade, all without the use of water pumps. Nevsky Prospekt, as the main boulevard is known, is a sight to behold. We in India could learn a thing or two from the designer who planned the layout. The Peter and Paul Fortress, the Cathedral of St. Isaac, the Chesma Church and the Alexander Column in Palace Square are other interesting sites.
The city is best explored on foot, so be prepared to walk. We walked and climbed steps until our legs turned to jelly. As you make your way through the roads and bylanes, you realise that St. Petersburg has a royal air around it. Ironically, the essence is aristocratic though the citizens are poor, thanks to it having survived Stalinist purges and all manner of deprivations during the World Wars. Our tour guide, a frail, wispy, Russian girl told us the country is struggling to attain economic self-sufficiency.
Trams, trolleybuses, cabs and the metro make getting around the city an easy task but safety remains a tricky issue. You don’t see the mafia but you can’t help thinking it’s lurking in the background. ‘White nights’ occur in summer when the twilight glow lasts through the night, lending the city an eerie and irresistible aura. All that walking had worked up quite an appetite, so we had a humble Russian meal of soup, bread, meat and vegetables at a traditional restaurant. We were keen on trying one of the country’s most popular exports, vodka, but were told that Russian Standard Vodka and LIVIZ vodka would be too harsh on our feminine palates.
The young lads who served us expressed their adoration of Hindi films and music. Here everyone loves India thanks to the badshahs of Bollywood! How I wished they had heard of garam masala and pepper fry as well! The meagre sunlight lasted well after 11 pm but the inclement weather made sure we all scurried back to the warm coziness of our cabins on the cruise liner well before dinner time. The next evening when our ship set sail for Tallinn, Estonia, I decided to put St. Petersburg at the top of my bucket list once again. It’s a city that grows on you. At least it did, on me.
Pushpa is a writer with a penchant for travel
