The Kremlin, Moscow - 4 August 2008

A tour of the Kremlin was the last scheduled tour of the trip, this morning, with an optional add-on to visit the Armoury Museum. While there is some armour there, the museum has much else to offer - 10 Faberge Eggs, a dozen or so State coaches and sledges, a stunning collection of Ambassadorial gifts and many religious themed treasures like icon covers, jewel encrusted Bible covers and so forth.

The Kremlin tour took in two of the 6 churches that surround a small square inside the Kremlin walls. One of the members of our group was an ex-bombardier with the American air force who had been in charge of 6 nuclear warheads targeted on the Kremlin and one of our other cruise stops. He said that he had always thought that the only way he would ever see the inside of the Kremlin was from a parachute after having been shot down. We could identify with this feeling as for the first 40 years of our lives, the Kremlin had been associated with all that was antithetical to the western ideals and westerners that entered the Kremlin were in for a tough time.

One of the items on display in the Kremlin is the world's largest bell, weighing in at 200 tonnes. Although to call it a 'bell' is stretching the truth just a little as it has never rung, or even had its clapper mounted in it. Shortly after its founding, a fire destroyed the frame holding the bell and it fell to the ground where an eleven tonne chunk broke out of the side of the bell so, in reality, it is the world's largest bell shaped lump of bronze.

Because of flight schedules we had chosen to leave the tour early so, after lunch, we bade farewell to our companions for the last 10 days and set off to try the Moscow Metro; would that London tube trains operated on the same frequency. The Moscow circle line has trains each way every couple of minutes - a far cry from the Circle Line we are more accustomed too. Of course the London Circle Line has to share the rails with the Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City and District lines so the comparison is not all that fair.

There are various Moscow Metro stations that are notable for their platform art or architectural features so we set off on our own tour to see a few of them before taking the Metro to the place where the airport shuttle buses terminate. From the centre of Moscow to Domodedovo Airport is a very simple (Green line to penultimate stop, few metres walk to a 380 bus), reasonably quick (75 minute) and certainly inexpensive (79 Rouble) exercise.

Red Square, Moscow - 3 August 2008

The closer we got to Moscow the more the weather deteriorated until it was raining quite solidly.


It lifted for a time but still was very misty and as we set off for our Moscow city bus tour the rain returned so we walked a grey and dismal Red Square in the rain. Needless to say, it was not damp, grey or dismal in the GUM store, rather it was warm, bright and sparkly but there was insufficient time to explore the many avenues of shops in the GUM.

One of the optional evening activities was the Russian National Dance Show so, after an early dinner, we were taken to the Cosmos Hotel for the show which, as one would expect with a performance by the Russian National Ballet company 'Kostroma', was absolutely wonderful.

Before the intermission the history of Russia was told in dance and after the interval, various folk dances and songs were performed with stunning costumes and terrific choreography.

Uglich - 2 August 2008

Yesterday's tour was very late in the afternoon, this morning's was bright and early as we disembarked at Uglich. It was really 'same old, same old' and the general impression was that the group was suffering from church-lag. There is also an over exposure of a cappella church/folk choirs: 3 voices at Kizhi; 4 at Krillov; 5 at Yarosavl; and two choirs of 5 this morning, the only new thing being 3 female singers in one choir.



The oddest fact this morning concerned a bell that was rung in Uglich to announce the assassination of Ivan the Terrible's son Demitri. The official verdict was later decreed to be be that he cut his own throat while suffering an epileptic fit. The bell having, thus, alerted the townsfolk erroneously was taken down from the bell-tower, whipped and sent into exile in Siberia on the backs of some townsfolk. The bell has since been returned to Uglich and is displayed in the church built on the site of Demetri's unfortunate demise.

Yaroslavl - 1 August 2008

Leaving the main St Petersburg-Moscow route the ship took a 250 km side trip up the Volga River to Yaroslavl, the draw card being the UNESCO World Heritage listed Church of St Elijah in the main, or 'Soviet Square'. Unfortunately, we arrived on the feast day of St Elijah so the church was closed to visitors. This town was home to some 50 Russian Orthodox churches, as well as a monastery, nunnery, mosque and synagogue before the Soviet regime and only about half have survived.

The monastery really wasn't worth visiting, after the Kirillov monastery yesterday and, unless you were keen on onion domed churches, there was very little to see or do during our short stop-over. We visited the local market and saw the confluence on the Volga and Kotorosl Rivers and our overall impression was 'not worth the detour'. The most positive aspect of the day was the warm sunny day, much of which we spent on deck watching the world go by.

Goritsky & Kirilov - 31 July 2008

Our next stop was not scheduled until mid afternoon so we were entertained by part two of a very informative History Channel series Russia - the Land of the Tsars and then a tour of the bridge of the ship which, the Captain told us, was built in 1985.

The Russia – the Land of the Tsars series was played over 4 days and was an extremely interesting and informative program that gave a good grounding in the history of Russia and which, most of us acknowledged, filled in the lamentable gaps in our education.

At 2 p.m. the ship berthed at Goritsy a very small village, with a Nunnery, built on the shore of the White Lake, but that was not the purpose of our stop. We boarded a shuttle bus that took us to a nearby town that is built around the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery, the largest in Europe. The complex covers more than 10 hectares with its longest wall over 2 km. In 1397 Kirill the monk, then aged 60, walked the 500 km from Moscow to found this monastery at a place that that been revealed to him in a vision and although the thousands of hectares that once belonged to the monastery were confiscated by Catherine the Great the central buildings still stand as part museum, part monastery - now home to just three monks.

Amazingly the iconostasis survived the Soviet regime and while the main church is undergoing restoration a number of the icons from the iconostasis are displayed in the museum on site alongside others from different parts of Russia.

Kizhi Island - 30 July 2008

Outside our window when we awoke this morning was the jewel in the crown of Russian wooden architecture and construction, the Transfiguration Cathedral on Kizhi Island. This small island, only 6 miles long and one mile wide has now been turned into a heritage museum as a showcase of Russian wooden buildings. The three structures in the church ensemble; the Transfiguration Cathedral (1714), the Intercession Church (1764) and the bell tower (1874) are original but all the other buildings have been moved here from other islands.

Under restoration at the moment, the Transfiguration Cathedral cannot be visited, only admired from the outside, a fairy tale concoction of stacked octagons crowned with 22 domes clad in thousands of hand cut aspen shingles, it is quite breath-takingly stunning, all the more so when one considers that it was built 300 years ago without nails. Nails were not used as it took 30 minutes to manufacture a nail in the forge and iron or steel was too expensive.

The smaller Intercession Church next door was a "summer" church where we were treated to a fabulous a cappella piece by the choir of three monks. Leaving the church complex we visited a typical farmhouse to get an understanding of the life and times of the villagers. The bathhouse on the lake shore was used as a sauna complete with the birch twigs to stimulate blood flow before running down the jetty to plunge into the frigid waters of Lake Onega.

Nearby is a small chapel where we were treated to a bell ringing; a windmill that could be rotated on its axis "by six men, two cows or an angry country woman"; and beyond that the oldest wooden church in Russia, the Resurrection of Lazarus Chapel, thought to be built in the 14th century.

As night fell, we were transiting up a staircase of 6 locks on the Volga-Baltic Canal. These six locks raised the ship some 80m so they were impressively deep to sail into, even on the 4th deck we were not level with the cill that the ship would have to sail over at the upper end of the lock.

Mandrogy - 29 July 2008

Late in the evening the MS Bunin left the Neva River and set off across the largest lake in Europe, Lake Lagoda, but by the time we woke in the morning we were across the lake and steaming along the river Svir on our way to Mandrogy, arriving just after lunch.

Mandrogy is an interesting settlement; completely destroyed in WWII it was resurrected as a craft collective in 1996 to cater to the tourist boats plying the river between Lakes Onega and Ladoga. It was officially put back on the Russian maps in 1999. All the buildings are built in the traditional wooden style - some log cabin construction, some sawn timber and all the craftsfolk are dressed traditionally as well. Modern life has not been completely forsaken, as there were plenty of cellphones, credit card readers and the occasional computer in evidence.

By 1645 we were all back on board and heading for Lake Onega, the second largest lake in Europe. The river bank landscape was variously pine forest, birch forest, villages, scattered dwellings or abandoned industrial complexes that looked like they were just waiting to be used as the set of an action movie.

About two hours before Mandrogy we had passed through the first lock on the voyage. When we entered the lock there were some work boats and a floating crane there that looked deserted. However, once the lock was filled with water the boats sprang into life and proceeded to carry out a small repair on the lock wall. We simply had to watch and wait until they were finished before we could pass. The interesting thing was that the workman performing the task involving a crane manoeuvring a heavy object into a hole, managed to do so without hard-hat, hi-vis jacket, safety harness or life jacket!