War And Peace... and the icy delights of St Petersburg

One week ago today I was in St Petersburg – in my head. Thanks to Doctor Zhivago on RTÉ in the afternoon, followed by the first part of the new BBC dramatisation of War And Peace in the evening, I was dreaming of St Petersburg by bedtime and remembering my winter sojourn there some years ago. How many years ago I couldn’t precisely recall. So I dug out the guidebook I’d bought in advance of our trip and was shocked to see that on the flyleaf I had written ‘November 1999’. Crikey! That long ago!

But it got me thinking about what a great, great city St Petersburg is from a tourist’s point of view. And although people talk about how terrific it is to spend some ‘White Nights’ time there in the long, long hours of daylight in summer, I am so glad that my first experience of that beautiful city was in the depths of a Russian winter.

And those images from Doctor Zhivago and from War And Peace brought it all back to me.

Yes, it is cold – unbelievably cold – in St Petersburg in winter. (I can still remember the tiny icicles falling out of my husband’s moustache when he started to speak again after just a few minutes of silence as we walked the streets of the city.) But how atmospheric and memorable that makes it.

We were lucky. We arrived in late November, flew across the Gulf of Finland after an overnight in Helsinki, straight into a freezing cold but blue-skied and sunlit tableau.

On the first evening we walked down to the River Neva, only to be met by loud creaking noises coming at us through the darkness. What was it? The ice-floes on the river, great enormous pieces as big as flattened doubledecker buses, all creaking and groaning as they collided with each other before, finally, grinding to a halt. In front of us the next morning was a vast, frozen river that wouldn’t re-open for any boat traffic until the spring.

The most striking memories for me – apart from the actual ‘sights’ – are the scale of the place, and the colours. The scale was breath-taking – the vastness of the squares and the sheer size of

the buildings in this city that was founded by Peter the Great back at the turn of the 18th century. (The Winter Palace alone has almost 200 staircases and more than 1,500 rooms!)

But the colours. I really hadn’t expected the vibrancy of colour that we encountered in this Russian city, something that was especially striking against the backdrop of a blue sky, an ice-white river, and with a dusting of snow underfoot.

What stood out, and what I can still see in my mind’s eye, is the green of the Hermitage building, the blue of the cathedral of St Nicholas, the yellow of the Mussorgsky Theatre (where we went to the opera) and the multi-coloured ‘onion’ domes of the stunning Church on Spilled Blood.

So, if you are thinking about a trip to St Petersburg, especially if your appetite has been whetted by War And Peace, don’t put it off. Go now, in winter, and enjoy the city in all its icy glory.

As I write this, the temperature in St Petersburg is -19C. Yip! Icicles-in-the-moustache time, alright.

But an experience that you will never, ever forget.