St. Petersburg - Peterhof & Cathedral of Spilled Blood

The Grand Cascade at Peterhof

It may seem like an odd pairing for a post, but Peterhof and the Cathedral of Spilled Blood have something striking in common.  They are both reconstructions on a monumental scale of buildings badly damaged in WWII and serve as a testament to the dedication of the Russian people to preserve their history.  Peterhof, constructed as the summer palace of Peter the Great in the early 18th century, was almost completely destroyed as you can see from these photos.

Hard to imagine it as the same structure you see today.

The "Versailles" of Russia is, in fact, still undergoing reconstruction and will be for many years to come.  Photographs aren't allowed inside the palace so we can't show you how spectacular it is, but consider this:  the walls are covered in elaborately hand embroidered silk and it takes one person one year to reconstruct one square meter.  Now you can better understand why reconstruction is still ongoing!

There were originally 20 smaller palaces and seven parks at Peterhof.

The Cathedral of Spilled Blood was never actually used as a cathedral.  Built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, it was constructed as a memorial by his son Alexander III.  Also badly damaged during the war, the cathedral was used during the Siege of Leningrad as a morgue.  After the war it was used to store vegetables.  Its use as a vegetable storehouse led to its being nicknamed the Savior of our Potatoes.  After 27 years of reconstruction, the Cathedral reopened as a museum in 1997.  

Roughly 23,000 square feet of mosaics cover the interior walls.

St. Petersburg - The Hermitage Museum

The Winter Palace, once the residence of Russian Tsars,
 is one of five palaces that make up the Hermitage Museum.

Created as a private court museum by Catherine the Great in 1764, the Hermitage Museum has grown to contain over three million objects.  The entire museum encompasses just under two million square feet and contains the largest collection of paintings in the world.

There are works by da Vinci and Rembrandt, there are Dutch and Flemish collections, Titians and Rubens.  There is a French Impressionist collection with works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh and Matisse, and the largest collection of Spanish art outside of Madrid's Prado Museum.

There are rooms devoted to ancient Greek pottery and Egyptian mummies, a gold room and an armory collection, galleries of sculpture. There is so much to see that it is impossible to take it all in.

Then, there is the Winter Palace itself, one of the five palaces that comprise the Hermitage, it is its own work of art.

The Winter Palace stairway creates an impressive entrance for the museum....

grandly gilded in gold...

with exquisite chandeliers hanging overhead.

Ceiling are dramatically frescoed...

and the floors are intricately designed parquet.

Staircases are elaborate but...

simple compared to the door and hardware design.

The galleries are spacious as many objects are quite large...

such as the armory collection with its taxidermy horses.

All of these wonderful treasures....

are conveniently labeled in English as well as Russian...

and watched over not by armed guards but by serious ladies who keep an eye
on rooms such as this one, filled with the masterpieces of Rembrandt.