Our last Day in St Petersburg

Today was not only our last day in St Petersburg, but also in Russia, as we are leaving tonight on route to Finland.

Today we started the day with a late check out from our place which has been our home for the last 5 days.  Our first stop was to the Finlyandskiy Station to store our luggage for the day, prior to departing to Helsinki tonight from this station. This station has great significance to the Russian people, as this was the place where Lenin finally arrived in 1917 after 17 years in exile abroad. Here he gave his legendary speech from the top of an armoured car to a crowd who had heard of, but never seen, the man.

After a visit to Lenin Square, which is situated opposite this station, and we had a brief photo stop, we headed west to visit the Smolny Cathedral.

On the way to the cathedral, and only by chance we stopped at an interesting place. This place was the Museum complex “The Universe of Water”.  This place was really informative, given us comprehensive information about the development of the St Petersburg’s water and wastewater treatment plants over the last 120 years or so.

Smolny Cathedral is a church built in the baroque style, an unrivalled masterpiece of the genre that ranks among Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s – its architect – most amazing creations. The cathedral is the centrepiece of a convent mostly built to Rastrelli’s designs between 1748 and 1757. His inspiration was to combine baroque details with the forest of towers and onion domes typical of an old Russian monastery. There is special genius in the proportions of the cathedral – it gives the impression of soaring upwards, whilst the surrounding buildings, which were a convent at one stage, are a real contrast, as they are only 2 storeys high. Whilst the outside of this cathedral is very ornate, its interior is a rather austere plain white. I have to say that this place was a worth the long walk from the station to reach it.

We had a late lunch today at a typical local. Russian restaurant, chicken Kiev was on the menu for me today. The restaurant’s interior design was interesting, and I have included some photos in today’s blog.

After lunch, as we still had some time before catching the train, we caught the metro back to Nevsky Prospekt, one of the main shopping street in St Petersburg.  We visited the Kazan Cathedral. It was modeled on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  The interior of the Kazan Cathedral is ample, featuring various sculptures and icons produced by the best Russian artists of the period.

Afterwards we visited a bookshop, before visiting St Catherine’s Roman Catholic Basilica. This church was closed by the Soviet government in 1938.  At one stage the church was used to store vegetables and books. Recent restoration efforts started in the 1990s and were affected by a fire, so the basilica’s interior looks rather plain, at this stage. We decided to stay for the service, but it turned out that they were saying the rosary- which when on for over 45 minutes, so we could not stay for the mass.

An interesting thing happened at the beginning of the service, a young priest walked pass us holding a tripod. He then opened this small tripod and put a sign on it, the sign was in Russian as well as in English, it said “Confession this way”…… i did not see anybody going towards where the sign was pointing…..

 Finally we caught the metro back to Finlyandskiy Station, which is where we boarded our train to Helsinki for our 3 hours and 30 minutes ride to Finland, we will arrive there at 11.57 pm

Please see more photos of today’s journey  here

This was our last day in St Petersburg and proved to be another great day in Russia.