St Petersburg, Russia
This morning began early for a privileged group visit to Catherine the Great's Palace at Tsarskoy Selo (Czar's Village), renamed Pushkin after the Revolution. Driving out through the Pulkovo hills to the south of the city, we passed several monuments to the Blockade of the city during which, for 900 days, some 800,000 men, women and children died in appalling famine conditions. The former Czarist palaces, that ring the city like a necklace of pearls, became the bases for the Nazi command. When the siege of Leningrad, as the city was then called, was finally lifted in January 1944, the Nazis looted and destroyed these palaces. Lenin had advocated the preservation of the palaces after the Revolution as remembrances of aristocratic opulence. After the Second World War, the population of the city was determined to fully restore the palaces for a different reason. The palaces were part of Russian history and, as with the city itself, would rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of the People's War against Fascism.
It is an unparalleled restoration project only now, more than half a century later, reaching completion. Symbolic of the project as a whole, has been the slow, painstaking reconstruction of the famous Amber Room in Catherine's Palace finally completed this year in time for the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city. Mystery surrounds the disappearance of the amber from this room during the war. Various locations have been searched in vain from the bottom of the Baltic Sea to obscure cellars in German towns. A few years ago, a small section of the original amber was identified in a sale at Bremen but no clues as to the whereabouts of the original emerged. This summer, the restored Amber room has attracted unprecedented crowds to Catherine's Palace and our visit prior to the public opening of the palace gave us a chance to appreciate a remarkable work of art in relative tranquillity.
To complete a culturally rich day we moved on, after a splendidly traditional Russian lunch, to Peter the Great's summer palace at Peterhof on the Baltic shore. More impeccably restored, richly gilded interiors awaited us, but the main attractions here were the original gravity-fed fountains in the terraces below the palace. We had spent a day visiting not only two of Europe's finest architectural marvels but also shrines to the endurance, against all odds of a great European culture.
This morning began early for a privileged group visit to Catherine the Great's Palace at Tsarskoy Selo (Czar's Village), renamed Pushkin after the Revolution. Driving out through the Pulkovo hills to the south of the city, we passed several monuments to the Blockade of the city during which, for 900 days, some 800,000 men, women and children died in appalling famine conditions. The former Czarist palaces, that ring the city like a necklace of pearls, became the bases for the Nazi command. When the siege of Leningrad, as the city was then called, was finally lifted in January 1944, the Nazis looted and destroyed these palaces. Lenin had advocated the preservation of the palaces after the Revolution as remembrances of aristocratic opulence. After the Second World War, the population of the city was determined to fully restore the palaces for a different reason. The palaces were part of Russian history and, as with the city itself, would rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of the People's War against Fascism.
It is an unparalleled restoration project only now, more than half a century later, reaching completion. Symbolic of the project as a whole, has been the slow, painstaking reconstruction of the famous Amber Room in Catherine's Palace finally completed this year in time for the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city. Mystery surrounds the disappearance of the amber from this room during the war. Various locations have been searched in vain from the bottom of the Baltic Sea to obscure cellars in German towns. A few years ago, a small section of the original amber was identified in a sale at Bremen but no clues as to the whereabouts of the original emerged. This summer, the restored Amber room has attracted unprecedented crowds to Catherine's Palace and our visit prior to the public opening of the palace gave us a chance to appreciate a remarkable work of art in relative tranquillity.
To complete a culturally rich day we moved on, after a splendidly traditional Russian lunch, to Peter the Great's summer palace at Peterhof on the Baltic shore. More impeccably restored, richly gilded interiors awaited us, but the main attractions here were the original gravity-fed fountains in the terraces below the palace. We had spent a day visiting not only two of Europe's finest architectural marvels but also shrines to the endurance, against all odds of a great European culture.
