Good morning!
Or ‘privet’ (hello) as they say here in Russia.
We’re in St. Petersburg for our last day.
If you’ve been following our Russia series, which I will link below,
you know we’re here for 72 hours only.
Way too fast.
Without a visa.
We’re taking a ferry out of here later today
so it’s kind of a race against not only the boat that’s leaving that we need to be on
and the weather.
It’s supposed to pour rain later.
And we want to see as much as we can before we have to go
so we’re waiting for our Uber, our Yandex taxi now.
Basically Russian Uber.
I think it’s coming down the street now.
Yes I see it.
So we’re going to hop inside and get started.
Hello!
Privet! (Hello!)
Spasiba! (Thank you!)
Alright.
We have arrived at the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Yes.
And this is a really tall, skinny, gold spire
that you can see from all around the city centre in Saint Petersburg.
So we’ve really been wanting to come here.
So we’re crossing a bridge — it’s an island — and heading towards the spire.
I think the perfect place to start is with the Monument to Peter the Great,
which is just over my shoulder there.
Because St. Petersburg is named after Peter the Great.
He founded this city and really it all began here on this island —
the Peter and Paul Fortress as it’s now called, in 1703.
This is where Peter the Great started St. Petersburg.
And this monument has since been erected in front of the former guardhouse
and the sculptor based it on his death mask.
This yellow building with the really tall skinny gold spire is the Peter and Paul Cathedral.
When Peter the Great founded this fortress in 1703,
they began working on a wooden version of this church
and then in 1712, they started a stone cathedral
and it took them until 1733 to finish it.
We have got our tickets so we’re going to head inside.
Woo, wow!
Look at the ceiling.
We’ve just walked in and the first thing I always do is look up at the ceiling.
It’s painted with angels and it’s pink and green.
And it’s got those beautiful pastel colours.
Not colours that you often see in the church.
No.
And just covered in gold at the front.
This church is significant not only, of course,
because it was the first main cathedral in St. Petersburg,
but also because it’s where all of the Russian emperors and empresses
are buried except for two.
There are 50 people buried here and 46 of them are Romanovs.
And it all really started when Peter the Great’s daughter died
and she was buried here back when it was still a wooden church
and that laid the foundation for this to be the place for the tombs of the Romanovs.
And they’re not really marked so we got this little map to help us.
So we’re going to use it and just take a look around.
Right up here at the front of the church here in the front,
you see the tomb of Peter the Great.
And these are medals lying on the top.
And this tradition of laying medals at his tomb began way back in 1803.
And then beside him to the left there is his wife, that’s Catherine I.
And their daughter Elizabeth is the third one there.
And behind her is the tomb of Catherine the Great.
And if you remember the video we did where we visited the Catherine Palace,
that was built by Elizabeth there for her mother.
And the reason that the Catherine Palace is blue
is it was Elizabeth’s way of paying tribute to her mother’s eyes.
So interesting to have seen all of that and then see where the family is buried here.
We just found the tomb of Empress Maria Feodorovna
who when we were at the Fabergé Museum,
those were some of her Fabergé Easter eggs
that we saw and that were so, so beautiful.
And the last egg…the last Imperial Easter egg
that I think is called the Order of St. George,
she kept that for a long, long time until she died.
She loved it so much.
So it’s interesting now to see where she’s been buried.
This is a chapel where the remains of the last emperor of Russia,
Nicholas II and his family and his servants
were brought here to be buried in 1998
on the 80th anniversary of when they were killed.
That was really fascinating.
Yeah it’s so interesting to just learn more about Russian history being here obviously.
And also to just see so many tombs in one place.
Yeah, from one family is pretty extraordinary.
And this fortress is free to just walk around.
There’s lots of buildings.
They have a museum and the St. Petersburg mint is here.
And this yellow building behind us
was Peter the Great’s boathouse where he kept his little boat that he learned to sail on.
So there’s lots of things to see as you’re walking around
but we are going to head back across the river.
The Neva River?
The Neva.
Neva.
Back in towards the city centre.
We came down to the Neva River on our way into the city centre
just to get this crazy view across.
It’s so nice.
And it’s just spectacular.
These buildings are all immense
and I love seeing all the colours of them all together.
Yeah.
And little pops of gold along the tops.
Yeah.
And different churches.
It’s really, really something spectacular.
Walking away from the Peter and Paul Cathedral
and so nice that we can just walk along the river here.
There’s a lovely pathway.
Heading back across.
So right behind us is the Church of the Spilled Blood.
Such a beautiful church here.
And we have been here very quickly when we first arrived to St. Petersburg
and did a little bus tour
but we didn’t have a chance to go inside and we’ve been wanting to before we leave.
So we’re going to now go inside the church.
Oh my!
There’s signs everywhere about pickpockets, eh?
I know.
Everywhere.
I have everything zipped into my zippy pockets.
Apparently this church and the area around it is the…
the most pickpocketed place of St. Petersburg.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You have to be really careful.
This is not what I expected.
I don’t know what I expected but it’s all colourful mosaics.
Oh.
Everywhere like ceiling, the walls, it’s all pictures made with mosaic tiles.
Wow, it’s really different looking.
This is unbelievable when you first walk in
and you are just overwhelmed by the amount of mosaics in here.
It’s believed to be the largest collection of mosaics in the entire world.
It covers 7500 square meters
and they’re very colourful with gold mosaics as well.
And all depicting different scenes and stories from the bible.
I can’t imagine how long it would have taken to place each of those tiles.
I know that this took a while to build because it’s also built on the canal
but also you can just imagine how much time
doing this incredible tile work must have taken.
And this location was chosen because it’s where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated.
His son wanted to build a church in that exact place
to pay tribute to him and that’s also where this church gets its name,
Church of the Spilled Blood.
It was the blood of Alexander II that was spilled here.
They have an example here of some mosaics that you can touch
and you see how tiny each one is
and just imagine laying these all together
in the different patterns formed here in the church.
This canopy here marks the exact spot
where Emperor Alexander II was mortally wounded
and it’s the whole reason that this church was built, why it exists.
His son wanted to build it in the exact spot where his father had been wounded.
And if you look down, you can actually see cobblestone
because this is on the embankment of the canal and it’s the exact spot where it happened.
We’ve just exited the church and right behind these stones here is where that canopy is.
So you can see how close the church is to the canal here.
And so Alexander II was going along the canal here
and then just beyond that wall marks the spot of where the assassination took place
You would not believe what has happened between now and the last time you saw us.
It feels a little bit like we’re in Amazing Race right now.
Yeah, it did.
We actually missed the shuttle from our hotel.
I’ve been visualizing making the boat.
Making the boat.
I think we’re going to miss the boat.
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