Vodka and a tonic in War And Peace country
When a significant birthday loomed, James Meehan and his wife opted for culture, history … and a museum devoted to Russia’s top tipple
We are in one of Moscow’s famous palaces surrounded by vaulted ceilings and chandeliers, stained glass panels and gilded archways. This, however, is not the palace of one of Russia’s great Tsars but rather one of Stalin’s ‘Palaces for the People’. We are in a metro station.
The Moskovsky metropolitan is one of the busiest metros in the world, carrying up to nine million people a day. And it is undoubtedly the most beautiful.
To mark a significant birthday of my wife’s we have travelled to Russia on a guided tour from the Travel Department’s Occasions range of holidays.
Having arrived the evening before, we checked in to the Marriott Hotel on Tsverskaya boulevard, making sure to stroll along the avenue that sweeps down the hill and around a gentle bend to reveal this great city.
There’s the theatre district and the Bolshoi on the left, with Red Square and the Kremlin in front of us. Around Red Square you have the palatial GUM department store, the onion-domed St Basil’s Cathedral, Lenin’s mausoleum and, of course, the Kremlin.
The Kremlin or ‘fortress inside a city’ has been occupied since the second century and became the Palace of the Tsars until Peter the Great decamped to St Petersburg in the early 1700s. The Armoury museum is in the Kremlin and houses a magnificent collection of artefacts of the former Tsars. This collection consists of clothes, weaponry, jewellery, including the famous Fabergé eggs, and a brilliant collection of carriages used by various Tsars. A highlight is the 23-horse winter sledge-coach used by Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, to make the threeday journey from St Petersburg to Moscow for her coronation in 1742.
A good measure of any city is the markets – and it’s how myself and Eleanor found ourselves in the metro, plotting a route for the Izmailovsky flea market. Entering the sprawling area you are met with the same kitsch tourist offerings you can find anywhere in Moscow but as you move through the stalls you realise you could find literally anything here: hand-crafted jewellery, Russian militaria, religious icons, wolf and bear skins samavars by the hundred.
Needing an antidote to the boisterousness we took refuge in the oasis of Novodevichy cemetery, where the list of people buried here tells the history of Russia. There’s the writers Bulgakov, Chekov, and Tolstoy; composers Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich. But there’s also the graves of Boris Yeltsin, first president of the Russian Federation who died in 2007, and Nikita Khrushchev the premier of the Soviet Union who was responsible for several reforms before being removed from power in 1964. The gravestones themselves are remarkable. Many feature a carved bust of the dearly departed and some have a life-size sculpture of the individual lying below. One of the best known is a memorial to the Russian actor Yuri Nikulin, as he sits smoking a cigarette with his favourite dog Fedor at his feet.
Next stop: St Petersburg. Taking the Sapsan high speed train from Moscow to the city dubbed ‘Venice of the North’, the journey takes less than four hours with the train reaching speeds of 220kph. St Petersburg is a European-style city built around the rivers and canals. Peter the Great founded the city in the early 1700s and moved his court there from Moscow. We were staying at the Hotel Domina, a funky boutique hotel overlooking the Moyka river and about a 10-minute walk from Nevsky Prospect St Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. We spent a wonderful day just walking around.
En route we passed though St Isaac’s Square, with the cathedral at one end and a statue of Nicholas I at the other. Also on the square is the Astoria Hotel where Hitler had planned and even issued invites to a celebratory dinner to mark the fall of the city of Leningrad, as it was called then. It is now a great matter of pride for the residents of St Petersburg that the city never fell to the Nazis and Hitler’s soiree was cancelled. Midway down Nevsky Prospect is Eliseyev Food Hall an amazing art nouveau emporium where we enjoyed a coffee and a Napoleon pastry sitting under the giant palm tree as locals purchased their groceries . Just off Nevsky Prospect is the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. The church is built on the location where Tsar Alexander II was mortally wounded in a bombing attack.
One of the best ways to see St Petersburg is by boat. There are numerous tour boats and water taxis, some offering a day pass that allows you get on and off at the various locations around the city. No visit to Russia would be complete without trying some genuine Russian vodka and the place to do this is at the Russian Vodka Rooms, a restaurant and vodka museum.
Browse the menu and you’ll see that the selection of vodkas – more than 150 varieties – is more extensive than the bill of fare devoted to food. With the help of our waiter we chose a selection of vodkas, a Baikal, a Czar’s Gold and a Beluga Nobel, along with a selection of traditional snacks of sour cabbage, meats, cheeses and salted cucumber, all for the princely sum of €25. Chekov said ‘for 200 years gastronomes have tried to invent the best accompaniment to go with vodka, but still they could not find anything better than salted cucumber’. Our vodka tasting skills would not be up to arguing with Mr Chekov so we just took him at his word.
The Hermitage museum is a complex of six buildings including the famous Winter Palace. It was founded by Catherine the Great in 1764 and it is one of the world’s best and largest museums. There are over three million items in the collection including the biggest collection of paintings anywhere, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna Litta and 23 works by Rembrandt including The Return of the Prodigal Son. The museum is definitely worth a visit but allow plenty of time as there is so much to see and it is always busy.
On the last day while en route to the airport the trip was brilliantly rounded off with lunch in a local restaurant. A typical Russian meal consists of a salad course, a soup course and the main. Our soup was of course the Russian favourite borscht, a rich earthy beetroot soup, which was a far cry from a bowl of red water I once had the misfortune of eating on a previous visit to Moscow in the early 1980s.
The main was, once again a Russian favourite, chicken Kiev. After lunch we visited the Peterhof Palace and gardens with its spectacular Grand Cascade of fountains and then to the airport for a late afternoon flight home.