Posted on 07/11/2006 6:43:54 AM PDT by tvguru
Russia's 'second city' rich in art and elegance
Monday, July 10, 2006
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) -- Glorious on one block, dismal on the next -- St. Petersburg is a chalice holding the extremes of Russia's history.
For an outsider trying to grasp Russia's sweep and complexities in a short trip, St. Petersburg may be the ideal synopsis. It's the pinnacle of czarist ostentation and the place where Russian literature reached great heights. The city's miseries have been just as dramatic -- the poverty and degradation that Fyodor Dostoevsky recorded, the three-year Nazi siege that drove the city into starvation and disease.
President Vladimir Putin's decision to hold the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg July 15-17 rather than in the capital Moscow underlines the sense that the city is the country's emotional essence.
Yet for all its psychological importance to Russia, a visitor's initial impression may be of how St. Petersburg doesn't seem very Russian at all. The city that Czar Peter the Great founded three centuries ago on swampy islands at the mouth of the Baltic Sea to be Russia's "window to the West" also gave European culture an inroad into Russia.
The city's emblematic church, St. Isaac's Cathedral, doesn't have the onion domes and spires typical of Russian Orthodox churches -- it more resembles St. Peter's Basilica or a U.S. state capitol building. Nevsky Prospekt, the main avenue, displays an array of Western European and even American architectural styles.
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
Been there, seen that. I would go back to St Petersburg in a heartbeat.
I was there over night once on my way else where. It was pretty but I didn't get to check out much.
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