Peter and Paul Fortress

First of all, realized I have yet to really say thank you for reading this random collection of thoughts and experiences, it really does make me feel like the miles between us are less meaningful. So thank you!

Its hard to believe I’ve been in St. Petersburg for almost three weeks (and by the time I post this it will have been more than three weeks). Time has already started to accelerate and I imagine its only going to get faster. This past week especially has been an absolute whirlwind. We ended last week with an excursion to Peter and Paul fortress, the birthplace of St. Petersburg. It is on one of the many islands, Petrogradsky, and is home to the cathedral which serves as the final resting place for every emperor (meaning tsar since Peter I) except one of the Russian Empire. We lucked out and had absolutely gorgeous weather, and our favorite tour guide came to meet us! It was our third tour with her (city bus tour, trip to Pavlovsk, and now Peter and Paul Fortress) and we have discovered we are absolutely spoiled by her. More on that later. Anyway, the fortress was essentially used for a detention center for prisoners, it was too ‘inconvenient’ (to plagiarize our tour guide) to communicate with the island in the 18th and 19th centuries so it was never really the center of the city. It did house some rather famous prisoners though, writer Dostoyevsky and some of the Decembrists included.

The cathedral was beautiful, though as our guide explained it looks much more like a European cathedral than a Russian or Orthodox one. This was largely due to the fact that Peter wanted everything in his ‘Window to the West’ to be as European as possible. Also in the cathedral is an exhibit explaining the discovery of the bones of the members of the ruling family, the Romanovs, after the revolution and their ceremonious return to the cathedral in the fortress. They are buried in a special room. I loved seeing the church, of course, and the prison was very interesting too. Our guide took us into the ‘punishment cell’, which was a tiny and completely enclosed room, and turned off all the lights on us without warning – which caused a bit of chaos. After the tour I went up with Adam and Tom to the ‘Neva panorama’ walk along the top of the fortress walls to take some pictures of the mainland side from across the river and take advantage of the sunshine and warm temperatures. We spent some time wandering the main area of town until after dark, but had to be up early for Novgorod the next day so most of us had a relatively quiet night.