Nothing compares to the beauty of Russian countryside, with its white birch groves, tall red pines, rainbow-colored flower meadows and sparkle of the Golden Autumn. No wonder, then, that odes to Russian Nature have been sung by many a writer, poet and artist. And nothing encapsulates the classic Russian countryside quite like the Oka River…
Moscow is an incredibly green city. It has 120 parks in total – 120!!! – and the whole 20% of the Central district is taken up by park spaces. A week doesn’t pass without me taking a walk in a park, no matter the time of year. With so many to choose from, there is…
The small, pedestrian Patriarch’s Bridge connects the northern crescent of the city with Bolotny (Bog) Island in the Moscow River, and offers some of the best panoramas of central Moscow. It begins right behind Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the tallest (and one of the largest) Orthodox Christian church in the world, erected to commemorate…
I feel like this winter went by so fast – especially with me spending most of its advent abroad – that I already miss its crisp, snowy days. One such day I took a fantastic 9-kilometer (5.5 mile) walk across the Moscow Center. This is Part 1, basking in the glow of a winter sunset:…
Suzdal is famous for its churches. It is also famous for the sheer number of them – some 40 in a town of 10,000 folks. Back in the day Suzdal used to have one church for every 10 inhabitants! I have no idea about the cause of this phenomenon; although Suzdal is a very old…
Here are some random interesting bits from Tallinn. A Tale of Two Churches The Soviet Union was not kind to organized religion of any stripe, and thousands of churches were outright destroyed or re-purposed for other needs of the people. Old Town Tallinn has two remarkable examples of ecclesiastic architecture with equally fascinating histories. The Russian…
Moscow has more than 300 churches. The oldest one still standing dates back to the early 1400s; the main cathedrals of the Kremlin are about 50 years younger. Those that survived 70 years of Communism, were rebuild afterward or created since represent seven centuries of ecclesiastic architecture. Of course the oldest churches have seen several…
Spring has been slow to come to Moscow this year. In fact, most of March and the first half of April looked and felt like like preceding December and February (we got a couple of weeks of proper frosts and a dusting of snow in January): temperatures in single digits Celsius, grey skies, wilted green-ish…
Anyone who knows me knows that I love to plan, and the thing I love to plan above all is travel. Mapped out itineraries, color-coded Excel timetables, museum tickets purchased in advance – all this stuff gives me the special kind of tingles. So when an opportunity presented itself not just to go to Saint…
I had many an ambitious day-tripping plan for my Winter Hols. Arkhangelskoye — a comparatively modest country estate that over the course of the 17th-20th centuries had passed through the hands of several prominent aristocratic families of Imperial Russia — was not on that list. In fact, I had never heard about it and found…
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