Images from St. Petersburg, 2002 Page 2  |
The view from Nevsky Prospect, towards the Church on the Spilled Blood. This church was built in the 1880's, to a design of architecture several hundred years older. It was built on the spot on which Czar Alexander II had his legs blown off by an anarchist bomb in 1883. No longer used as an Orthodox church, it is now a museum. |
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Closer shot of the Church on the Spilled Blood. |
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Architecture at the bank of the Bolshaya Neva. A lot of the buildings in city centre are palaces of the former aristocracy. |
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The front of the Winter Palace. The Palace and its associated square haven't changed since the 1910's. You almost expect Nicholas and Alexandra to come strolling by with Anastasia and little Alexei. |
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Me in front of the Russian State Museum. There's a pack of teenage naval cadets in their black uniforms to the right. |
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Side view of the face of the Russian Museum. Before the Revolution it was the Mikhailovsky Palace. |
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Shot of the Winter Palace, from the other side of the Bolshaya Neva. |
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A shot from part of the outer facade of the Hermitage, a bit north of the Winter Palace. There are a row of bronze atlases holding up the overhang. The scale of the architecture really doesn't come through in the photographs. Up close, it's hard not to be filled with awe at the size and grandeur of everything. |
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Looking out from the Winter Palace towards Dvortsovaya square. The pillar is being refurbished for the city's birthday festival in the Summer of 2003. |
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One of the halls inside the Winter Palace. There are 1,057 rooms and no two are alike. The palace gives the word "baroque" a new meaning. |
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Winter Palace interior. |
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Winter Palace interior. |
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Winter Palace interior. |
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The throne of Nicholas II, the literal seat of power of pre-1917 Imperial Russia. |
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The small dining room in the Winter Palace. After the February Revolution, Kerensky's Provisional government used the building as their headquarters. When fighting broke out during the October Revolution, the government moved to this room because it was less vulnerable to gunfire from outside the building. Kerensky surrendered when sailors from the cruiser Aurora (a crappy old pre-Dreadnought anchored nearby on the Neva) fired a blank shell in the direction of the palace. The Bolsheviks stormed in, and it was around this table that Kerensky was arrested, bringing an end to Russia and the beginning of the Soviet Union. The clock on the mantlepiece is still set to the moment that the Bolshevik troops rushed in. |
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St. Isaac's Cathedral dominates the skyline of St. Petersburg. Built between 1818 and 1858, the church needed more than 100 kilos of gold leaf to cover. The interior is is covered with murals and iconography, and uses 14 different types of marble. Unfortunately, cameras aren't permitted inside. |
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Kazan Cathedral, about halfway down Nevsky Prospect. |
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Smolny Cathedral. Not to be confused with Smolny, the city hall, this cathedral was originally built by the Italian architect Rastrelli as a girls' school. |
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This is the courtyard of an apartment builing near our dorm on Vasilevsky Island. Where some architects might place a swimming pool, a garden, or some other scenic object, the architects of this building decided instead to place two of the main triple gun turrets of the old heavy cruiser Kirov. How romantic. |
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Guns of the Kirov, pointing outwards towards the Gulf of Finland. |