St Petersburg is sometimes called the Venice of the North, due to its many canals. Although I did find an article in Wikipedia with an amusingly long list of cities and towns that have been referred to as the Venice of the North, St Petersburg does probably deserve that title. Built across the marshlands of the Neva River delta, St. Petersburg is interlaced with around a hundred tributaries and canals with a total length of 300 kilometers and over 800 bridges crossing them. With another warm sunny day and clear blue skies a trip up the Neva River passing palaces and mansions, crumbling old buildings and sumptuous restorations, and lush green parklands was just what the doctor ordered.

We did not expect to come back from a Baltic Cruise with sun tans! We sat on the open deck of a flat canal boat and gazed in admiration while our expert guide described the sights & discussed life in St Petersburg today. She told us that Mr Putin is genuinely extremely popular, and that life in Russia is so much better than it used to be, people are happy.

Our canal boats waiting to escort us down the river.

The St Petersburg Mosque

One of two “rostral columns” built in 1810 as beacons where the main port was located. They are in the style of Roman rostral columns – victory columns on which the prows (“rostra”) of captured enemy ships were mounted.

The Kunstkammer (“Cabinet of curiosities”) Now the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, this was the first museum in Russia, and is one of the oldest in the world, founded by Peter the Great in 1718.

The Winter Palace – part of the Hermitage

Summer Palace of Peter the Great (1714), now a museum

Some buildings need a lot of work still.

Circus Ciniselli was the first brick-built circus in Russia, opened in 1877

Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace

The dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral

Spires of the Admiralty & Ss Peter & Paul fortress

The Panteleymonovsky Bridge & the gardens of Peter the Great’s summer palace. These trees were not (like most in Russia) cut down for fuel during the war.

Mikhailovsky Castle (Castle, not palace because it was fortified and surrounded by a moat, originally).

After the cruise we visited two of the famous churches of St Petersburg. The first one was the one I was really looking forward to – known as The Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, its official name is The Resurrection of Christ Church and it was built between 1883 and 1907. I always assumed that the “spilled blood” referred to Jesus, but in fact it was Tsar Alexander II who was assassinated in 1881 by a group of revolutionaries, who threw a bomb at his royal carriage. Alexander was a reformer, but was not popular and had previously survived many attempts on his life.

The church is decorated inside and out with detailed, brightly coloured mosaics and is quite a feast for the eyes. It was ransacked after the 1917 Revolution, and closed by the Bolsheviks in the 1930s. It was used as a temporary morgue during WWII and after the war as a storehouse for potatoes and other vegetables. Thankfully it has undergone an extensive restoration, reopening to the public in 1997. The main dome was covered in scaffolding, sadly, but the interior was absolutely dazzling.

So disppointing to see the scaffolding!

Every surface is covered in finely detailed mosaics

It was rather crowded! No-one seems to be having a very good time!

The Holy or Royal gates leading to the sanctuary

Closeup of the mosaic

Mosaic on the ceiling.

Mosaic detail.

Inside one of the domes

The is a blurry terrible photo but it’s the only one we have. It was dark and we were being ushered out. This is the pavement (now a shrine) on which Tsar Nicholas II’s blood was spilled.

Photo of a photo showing the before and after of the restoration.

Next stop was St Isaac’s Cathedral, once the main cathedral of Russia. It remains the 4th largest cathedral in the world. Now it is mostly a museum, though there is a small congregation that meets in a side room. It was designed by a French architect, Auguste Montferrand, who had to win two independent competitions to complete his design. The cathedral took 40 years to construct, from 1818 to 1858. 112 monolithic granite columns 17 metres high support the porticoes. This being a swampy site, about 24,000 piles had to be driven in for the foundation, which 11,000 serfs took a year to do, working day and night, winter and summer.  It can hold 14,000 standing worshippers.

This shot gives a bit of an idea of the scale of the building.

Mosaic of St Isaac holding the plans for the church

The cupola

The walls and ceiling are decorated with detailed paintings and mosaics, and lots of gold.

These doors are modeled after Ghiberti’s doors to the baptistery in Florence.

A model shows how the columns were put into position, an incredibly painstaking and difficult task.

Some of the 112 granite columns and a glimpse of the golden dome

Restoration is on-going. This is a painted screen hiding one arm of the cross shaped church.

The iconostasis, with its striking green columns made of Malachite, and two smaller inner columns of blue lazurite.

We had booked another tour for the afternoon, to the Russian Museum, which houses the world’s finest collection of Russian art. The gallery was founded by the Tsar Nicholas II to house his father’s art collection. However we just could not face another tour of another crowded museum, so we pulled out and spent a relaxing afternoon on the ship. Here’s a photo of the outside of the Russian Museum – that was as close as we got.