The Winter Palace and Hermitage

A side street off of Nevsky Prospect suddenly reveals the Winter Palace, where the royal family lived right up until the Cultural Revolution and which houses the Hermitage, an art museum often compared to Paris’s Louvre. Inside the Hermitage we walked through the imperial family’s staterooms and the Pavilion Hall. As to be expected, the rooms were ornate: gilded mirrors; plush, red furniture; and gold statues are the predominant décor. I found the vast collection of marble vases interspersed throughout the Hermitage more impressive than the royal family’s apartments.

St. Petersburg, Russia

St. Petersburg looks comparable to many other European cities we’ve visited: St. Petersburg is sprawling like London, has canals as in Amsterdam, is dense with palatial art collections like Paris, and is decorated with tree-lined boulevards as in Berlin. However, St. Petersburg is, in a word, “gritty”. Our first morning in St. Petersburg I wandered through Moylan, where we stayed, and wondered what the historical center of St. Petersburg looked like before Mikhail G.’s perestroika and if the city could possibly be more run down than it is today. After visiting St. Isaac’s Cathedral, whose gold dome can be seen from all parts of the city, and the Admiralty, I made a beeline up Nevsky Prospect towards the site that, for me, epitomizes St. Petersburg: the Church on Spilled Blood, or the Church of the Resurrection of Christ.

I walked along the canal that approaches the Church on Spilled Blood; it is even more colorful and distinctly modern than I had expected. The gold and blue paints along with the red-brick structure are a refreshingly spectacular feast for the eyes, especially in a city as downtrodden as St. Petersburg. The Church is the Mecca for tourists; although St. Petersburg has many architecturally-stunning sites such as the St. Isaac’s Cathedral or the Winter Palace, the Church on Spilled Blood is its most unique and fantastic building.