Friday was marked a chill day (and the last of thus) because the other girls had advising meetings all afternoon and Saturday morning required us to be at Kazan Cathedral at 7:30am. So after a chill day of meetings and venturing into the Russian equivalent of Canal Street, we all went home and hit the hay early, at about 9:30pm. Saturday morning I hauled my happy ass out of bed at 5:30 am, showered, and hopped the metro to Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky, right outside of Kazan. A short trip for me really. We were all loaded onto the bus and on our way by 8am, which made our dear leader David very happy with us. He said in previous years, people were always late and that’s rough because Novgorod is 3-4 hours away depending on the poor roads, weather, and traffic.
To get to Novgorod we passed through 3 hours worth of Russian country side, dachas, and small towns all which snoozing on and off on the bus. (Bless our bus driver for continuously driving around 30 rowdy college students who do not like sitting in one place for too long.) Novgorod itself is one of the oldest cities in Russia, first mentioned in the annals around 583 or so. Most of the city was destroyed when the Novgorod oblast (region) was taken during WWII, but it has been rebuilt beautifully. Before they started reconstruction, some of the intellectuals in the area got license to do historical digs in the area because of the history of Novgorod. Novgorod itself is beautiful; we got a tour of the original fortress and the Church of Saint Sophia with its surrounding monastery, which is beautiful and usually cited as the birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy. The icons inside the church were beautiful. I would even dare to say that on a scale of intricacy, St. Sophia outranks the Lavra. In Novgorod, there is also a branch of the eternal flame, lit from the one on the Field of Mars in St. Petersburg, to honor those who died in Novgorod during the sieges of WWII. (I’ve found that when you’re in Russia, you kind of begin to have a problem with Germany…) In the city center of Novgorod there is a statue/monument to the founders of Novgorod and Russia that has a total of 156 figures on it and text in old Slavonic. Our guide told us about the individual figures who include the first Prince of Russia, Ruric (invited to rule from the Nordic area), Peter the Great, and Vladimir (?) who helped to normalize Russian Orthodoxy.
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| Novgorod Fortress |
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| Eternal Flame at Novgorod |
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| Saint Sophia's Cathedral |
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| Traditional Russian Village |
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| People must have been small back then.. |
After touring around main Novgorod for a while, we went to a very nice hotel where we ate a traditional 4 course Russian meal: some sort of salad and bread, borsht (!!!), Chicken Kiev, and a small tort with kiwi for dessert, followed by coffee or tea. I’ve become a serious tea whore since I moved here, and I think I might just have to continue my tradition of daily tea time when I return. After lunch, we went out further into the countryside and saw a few more churches/monasteries, a very cool windmill, and we visited a recreation of an old Russian town (which was by far our favorite thing of the day, go figure). Following some souvenir shopping, we loaded ourselves back on the bus to journey back to St. Petersburg after a day in Novgorod.
We got back around 9pm to find the city in the very first hours of what was to become an intense 10 hour city-wide celebration called Allia Rosa, which is where my next post begins….
xoxo
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