Breakfast
I started the day bright (not) and early by getting up at 5:30 am, getting dressed, and going downstairs for breakfast. The Russian food seems to be pretty similar to most European breakfasts with the exception of having a lot of cool and interesting dairy products. Cottage cheese fritters? yum. Condensed milk as a topping for…anything? Sweet. At this point, at least breakfast food is pretty similar to anything you’d find in any European hotel.
Walkabout
I started out with a quick walk around the city, leaving at 8 a.m. and returning by the time my driver arrived at 10. Since it is still dark until 10, nothing is open. Even coffee shops have 10 a.m. opening times. How do you guys get to work? there weren’t many other people milling about until around 8:30 or 9.
Some Context
Before we dive into the day, it seems a bit of context is in order. Judge me if you will, but here goes. I watched the cartoon movie Anastasia when I was in high school. It is completely 0% historically accurate. Anastasia was never thought to have escaped the massacre of her family. She was 17 when it happened, not 8. They weren’t living in a palace when suddenly the people overtook the walls. I know these things. But if you haven’t, I would implore you to watch it. It is a fantastic fairy tale, a story of searching for yourself, of resolve and bravery, not accepting the life you were handed. It is from this place that I initally found myself fascinated with Russia. I know it’s childish. But what great adventure starts with maturity? There are so many scenes that still resonate with me. If nothing else, just watch the part before the song “Journey to the Past” (it’s near the beginning) where she decides between accepting her life as an orphan and working at the fish market or deciding to strike out on her own and try to understand her past. “No one ever mentions fear, or how this world can seem so vast”.
As a senior in high school, I once went to a museum exhibit about the Romanov family. There were rooms and rooms of delicate, ornate trinkets recovered from palaces. Carved hairbrush handles and gilded mirrors. A romantic idea of an imperial time where the Tsar’s daughters had gilded mirrors while the people starved. As an adult it is much more difficult to romanticize these things. After rooms and rooms of samovars and china, the final room described the demise of the Tsar and his family. The only details I remember from this particular visit were that the women had sewn jewels, gold, valuables into their corsets. And that fateful night that they were killed, the bullets didn’t penetrate their re-enforced corsets. So they were shot many times, then stabbed with bayonettes. It was horrific and detailed. And there was tiny exhibit in this room, a 1 sq. ft. glass case, that within held a piece of the wallpaper from the room where they were shot, splattered with real Romanov blood. I was wrecked. For some reason, that piece of wallpaper just gutted me. So with this in mind, I prepared myself for my day today. Today, we will visit the cathedral erected on the place where the Romanov family was murdered. We will also visit the place where their bodies were attempted to be destroyed and hidden, followed by the place where what was left of their remains were buried.
Europe Asia Border
My driver and guide showed up at 10, and we began the day. We started by visitng the Europe/Asia border. This was actually cooler than I expected, and I had expected it to be cool. She actually had some answers for how and when the border was decided, owing to the earliest scientific understanding of plate techtonics. My guide this round is fantastic, knows so much about the history and resources in this region. She points out different types of semi-precious stones and tells me their meanings, explains the economy in the Ural mountains with relation to mining of minerals, gold, and diamonds. The Europe/Asia border has lots of symbolic things. There is a sculpture representing an A and an e, erected on the border. The stone base of the sculpture is made of stones mined from the farthest east point in Asia (somewhere in China I think), and the farthest west point in Europe, somewhere in Portugal, symbolizing the 2 continents coming together as 1. The building here, a souvenir shop, has a Chinese dragon and a Portugese rooster on top, again symbols of Asia and Europe. This is a popular spot for newlyweds, and there is a whole section of the forest where the newlyweds ceremonially tie a ribbon around a tree and drink champagne to hope for a happy life together. The trees are covered in multi-colored ribbons and there is a fence made of empty champagne bottles.
Ganina Yama
Next we visited Ganina Yama, or Ganin’s Pit. The Romanov family had been exiled to this town. Already removed from the throne, the family was imprisoned in a large house and fenced in. They had 4 servants who chose to stay with them and there were nuns from the town who brought them food and provisions and helped them smuggle out valuables. Already imprisoned and without political power, they weren’t a threat. But there were people in the country who wanted the Tsar returned to power, and began a plot to rescue the family. Upon feeling their power threatened and fearing an uprising, the new government decided the only way to ensure the end of the Tsar’s reign was to end the entire bloodline of the monarchy. The family was led into the basement, shot many times, stabbed with bayonettes. It was horrific and brutal. The gunmen were not professional, well trained gunmen, as the professional gunment refused to murder women and children. So the murders were very brutal, bloody, painful. This was not a people’s revolution overthrowing the Tsar, but only 11 men, in the dead of night, secretly working for the new government. They had to hide the bodies, and brought down rugs into the basement to roll up the bodies in. The floor was so covered in blood that the carpets were instantly soaked. They transported the bodies to a place called Ganin’s pit, or Ganina Yama. There were 2 pits, previously used for mining, and the bodies were thrown into them. But the bodies floated. So they were dragged out of the water, to the edge of the pit. They were then set on fire, but there were 11 bodies, and it takes an extreme amount of heat to burn 11 bodies. So gallons of hydrochloric acid were ordered to try to destroy the bodies or at the very least disguise their identities. After 2 days at Ganina Yama, what was left of the remains were taken away by truck. The truck only made it 2 km before getting stuck in the mud. So the remains were unceremoniously buried here, in Pigs Meadow, on the side of the road. And here they remained for 70 years. My guide says that it took 70 years for the society to ‘mature’ enough to realize that this was unacceptable. They were just children, and they deserved at least to be buried properly. Their remains were removed to Saint Petersburg, where there is a tomb for them now. All of Tsar Nicholas’s cousins were also murdered in the following months.
Ganina Yama is now a monastery, and there is a church built in honor of each member of the family. As we enter, as women, we are required to cover our hair (we are both wearing hats because it is cold), and to wear an apron because we’re not wearing long skirts. The structures are entirely made of wood; even the nails are wooden spikes. We visited the chapel of Tatiana, the eldest sister and walked through a museum exhibit in the church dedicated to Tsar Nicholas II. The wooden churches are beautiful. The onion towers are gilded and have patterns hammered into them. Apparently, the ‘onions’ are flames, praising God, which makes sense considering the copious amount of candle lighting inside the churches. On the inside, no photos are allowed, but they are still filled with icons, gold-haloed paintings, and an entire wall of gold-framed portraits of saints. My guide says that this place is less ostentatious than the cathedral built in honor of the Romanov family in the middle of town, but it’s still shockingly ornate. It is a beautiful, serene place. The snow and the gold towers are beautiful. My guide explains that, when the remains were found, Prince Alexei and Princess Maria’s remains were not found with the rest of the family. In Russia, this led to rumours that they had escaped. But then their remains were found only a few meters from the rest of the family. DNA testing has shown that all of the Romanov family are accounted for, and my guide is a bit incredulous that people from the USA are so hung up on the Princess Anastasia because some woman claimed to be her. Obviously it was Princess Maria who might have escaped. Still, Anastasia was the youngest, at 17. They were not tiny children that could have slipped through the cracks in the middle of the ruckus. They were all essentially adult-sized people, easily accounted for. As we walked through the exhibit of the royal family, a few things struck me. This family loved taking photos, and there are dozens of beautiful family photos with the children always in matching, super adorable clothes. This is some of the information used to create the Anastasia movie, so that the family, every member of the family, looks like their movie counterpart. The fantasy scenes from the movie that show them swimming and laughing and dancing, all of those clothes are here. It’s surreal to see this fantasy movie superimposed on real life people. The gift shop sells guilded icons of the family, who are now sainted by the Russian Orthodox Church. And their icons and paintings look exactly like the movie (technically the movie looks exactly like them). The other thing that I noticed is that… holy cow this is not as long ago as I had thought. In my head, this was taking place the same time the US Civil War was happening. A cruder, less evolved time, where violence was more tolerated. But this happened in 1917-1918. Just a decade before WWII broke out. Prohibition and women’s suffrage and full-on Game-of-Thrones monarchy obliteration, all around the same time.
Church on the Spilled Blood
We drive the 2 km to the Pigs Meadow and observed the spots where the bodies were left. There are markers there now, but the bodies have been moved to St. Petersburg.
We move along to the Cathedral on the Blood. The entire royal family was murdered in the basement of a house where they were being held as prisoners. To combat the pilgrimages to this house and martyrdom of the family, the house was torn down by the new government. However, the basement where the murders happened was left intact. And now, a cathedral has been build on that spot, with the basement still accessible from within the cathedral. It is a beautiful cathedral, with the lower floors being dark and tiled with red/pink/orange tiles to represent all of the blood lost. And the higher floors are brighter and more hopeful. Inside, it is ornate, covered in dozens of images of the royal family, now recognized as saints. It is golden and ostentatious. There is a religious official praying and singing with a young woman in a ritual I do not understand. People are coming in, actual believers, religious people from the town, praying and bowing and crossing themselves. I’m not sure if it is still called ‘genuflect’, as it’s a slightly different gesture from the Catholic version. Walking Tour
Finishing The City Tour
After this, we drive around, do a bit of a city tour by car. We go to the river that runs through town, now frozen, watch the people walking across. We drive the entire Lenin street, look at their beautiful opera house, many mansion complexes owned by gold and mineral mine owners, and end at the largest university in town, with almost 100,000 students, counting full and part-time. We look out the window at statues and she tells me about the history of the different people who have influenced the region. The founders of the city, Sverdlov (namesake of the former name of Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk), and a Gorbachev convention center. After this hour drive, we arrive back at my hotel. It is 3 p.m., and somehow my 10a.m. -3 p.m. tour did not include either lunch or a stop for lunch or snacks. This is yet another part of the total lack of organization I have experienced from my tour company.
Museum Fail
My tour guide had earlier mentioned that one of the museums does the historical costume photos, so I start the 15 minute walk there. Though famished, I know there are only 2 hours of daylight left. In my head, I will go to this costume photo place, walk to the restaurant recommended by the tour guide, walking through a street market I had noticed earlier in the day, then maybe take a cab out to explore a residential part of town, maybe go to a Czech pub for a beer, then take a cab home. Ahh, but this was just not meant to be. I hurriedly walked to the museum, waning to be sure I was there before it closed. I arrived in 15 minutes, but sadly, the museum was closed for a private event: a New Years program for children. They made a phone call and gave me directions to another museum, which I assumed would have something similar? We are all speaking Russian, so it’s a toss-up. I walk a block to the other museum, a doll and book museum for children. There are no costume photos here :/ But there are 2 very nice ladies who are trying desparately to help me, and so they sell me a ticket to the museum and give me an English guide. I walk through the 10 or 12 cases of super creepy very old dolls, each set to show a scene from a different Russian fairy tale, which certainly adds to the creepiness factor. They are not dissimilar from the actual Brothers Grimm tales in their methodology for ‘teaching children a lesson’.
Street Market
Upon this failure, I begin my walk back to the street market. Where was that again? I get a bit turned around and walk for quite some time, enjoying the walk, finding a pedestrian street full of modern shops and restaurants, including a Czech one. I look it up on line and decide to continue, hoping that the restaurant recommended by the guide will be better. I walk by an outdoor ice skating rink, full of children skating. It’s getting dark, so I continue in search of the street market. Finally, I find the street market. Many people are in the process of packing up their wares, but there are still lots of little booths and shoppers. It’s cute, but almost everyone is selling semi-precious stones mined in this area and jewelry.
Searching for food
I continue walking, plodding now, through the snow in the dark. The darkness is starting to wear on me, as I feel like I should already be where I’m going by the time it gets dark, but I can’t eat every day at 5. I pass a restaurant, with a sign that says ‘Traditional Russian Kitchen’, so I stop and peak at the menu. Not wanting to eat and then be stuck super far from my hotel, I keep walking to the one recommended by my guide. My calves are starting to ache and my feet hurt and I’m quickly running out of steam, hoping a meal will reinvigorate me, still having gone without lunch. I see another ‘traditional Russian kitchen’ across the street as I am walking, but continue on my set path. Finally I arrive at the restaurant, Riba yest!, literally “Eat fish!” I was assured they serve more than just fish. I walk up to the door, but….there is a sign: zakrit. Closed for a special event. It’s a Friday night and lots of companies are hosting their Christmas/New Years parties. The sign does say I can try their other 2 restaurants, a Choco Cafe or ‘Wasabi’, their Japanese restaurant. Deflated, I see a bench, brush the snow off of it, and sit down. I try to search google maps, but the google has been supremely unhelpful this trip. I collect myself and decide to go back to the nearest restaurant with Russian food, Petrov Dvor. I walk a couple of blocks, passing an interesting looking place called ‘Pashkin Bar’. It has food, appears to serve local beers. It is also down a narrow, dark alleyway and there are no people around. I chance it, walking to the Pashkin Bar sign, only to find the entrance to the place is in the basement, down a flight of stairs to an unlit metal door with no window. This does not look inviting, and unable to see the type of place I might be walking into, I pass. On to Petrov Dvor. Petrov Dvor is in a nice looking building that looks like it was once a house. There are signs with photos of their food outside, well lit, very inviting. I walk around the side of the building to the entrance and…. zakrit. Special event. Am I going to eat at Burger King? They’re everywhere. I start walking again, back to the first place I saw. I was pretty sure they did not have a zakrit sign on the door. This is the restaurant Ryanov. I walk another 10 minutes, almost back to the street market.
Finally food
Ryanov looks like a house as well. I go around to the side where the entrance is, open the heavy door. It is warm inside. There are maybe 6 tables total, with only 1 being occupied by a group of around 8 men just finishing their meal and enjoying the last of their bottle of vodka. They welcome me into the restaurant, gesture for me to sit anywhere. I remove my coat and hat, hang them on the rack, and take a seat in the back corner. The waitress appears from the kitchen. She looks just like Red from Orange is the New Black. Younger and thinner, but wearing a white kercheif over her bright red hair, with very fair skin and bright red lipstick and dark eyeliner. She comes to my table and takes my order. This is a stange thing here. Waiters and waitresses approach the table the moment you sit down to ask what you want. I haven’t looked at the menu yet, and I have no idea how I am supposed to know. I ask for beer, and she returns with the 2 kinds they have: Heinekin or Edelweiss. Of course I take the weissbeer and she brings a glass to empty the bottle into. Again, I am not sure the custom here, but no one seems to ever return with the menu to ask if you want desert. Do I ask for dessert menu? Order dessert up front with everything else? I dunno. So this time, I try to order everything at once. I pick an appetizer of black bread, fried, with garlic, and a tomato dipping sauce. I will forever be trying to replicate the Czech topincky. Then I order a plate of beef medalions with potatoes and paprika sauce, and a slice of their house specialty cheesecake for dessert. She smiles as we awkwardly try to communicate. The gentlemen at the other table are having a great time, boisterous and laughing. They smile and wave several times. I have no idea what they’re saying to me, but I smile and nod. For a nice, white tablecloth, traditional restaurant, there is Russian dance music playing, and a television in one corner is showing “Gone With the Wind” on mute. It seems appropriate. Look at these beautiful, yet completely terrible unsympathetic characters. It’s probably better muted. The men at the other table get up to leave, putting on all their coats and hats and waving goodbye to me. The waitress returns first with the cheesecake. She then offers me a cup of tea, which I accept. Black, not green. I’m proud of myself for knowing my colors like a kindergartener. I’m confused at the order of operations here, but maybe she wanted to make sure there was a piece of cake reserved for me in case the entire table of men ordered dessert. Then she brings my tea, which is far too hot to drink. And then the appetizer. This plate of fried black bread was already coated with raw minced garlic. A little light on the garlic for my preferences, but it was delicious with the beer. When she brought it out, she pointed at the menu and asked something. I thought she was asking if I wanted to order anything else. So I said ‘nyet’. I enjoyed my plate of bread and garlic. And continued enjoying it until it was all gone. She took away the empty plate. And now I am sitting here wondering. Did she ask if I wanted something else or say that the thing I had ordered was out and ask if I wanted something else? Do I try to order something now or just eat my cheesecake and leave? I start to panic a little, but then she returns with my entree. Fortunately it is a reasonably small portion because I have filled up on fried bread, about which I will never complain. There are mashed potatoes with onions and a slice of beef, perfectly medium rare, and little dollops of paprika sauce. It is warm and delicious and I finish my beer while enjoying the meal. Finally, it’s on to the cheesecake and my cup of now-reasonable temperature tea. Soups and hot drinks are served at near boiling here and I have burned my tongue too many times to count. The cheesecake is chocolate/caramel and it’s good with a warm cup of tea before I head back out into the cold. I pay the bill and tip well. The sign outside the restaurant says it is open until 8, but it is not quite 7 and I’m the only person here.
Calling it a night
Now, it is quite dark and I’m not sure I have the energy to venture out into the suburbs. I’m exhausted and rather than energizing me, having a meal has completely subdued me. Sadly, I didn’t make it out to the edge of town, so I walked back to my hotel. The cold weather has not been bad, honestly. But going out into the cold after warming back up is always the hardest part. And tonight, after this warm, inviting dinner at this lovely restaurant, I am just not happy with the chill. I trudge back to my hotel, go to my room and change, and then make use of the hotel’s hamam. It only takes 10 minutes to feel like I am completely heated through and through, but the heat is also draining. I go upstairs, try to write about my day, but fall asleep before 10.
