MONDAY - The Kremlin

MONDAY - We have been very excited to tour the Kremlin and today was the day! Our guide, Igor, came at 10am and took us for our personal tour. He started with a nice overview of the metro (Jeri's been working on understanding the metro and the stops so that we can get around the city on our own) and got us to the Kremlin quickly. (It's worth noting, no picture here really expresses how huge the Kremlin is, but this might).


The Kremlin borders one side of Red Square and as you might imagine, is heavily guarded outside and inside. For a 30-something who remembers the cold war as a kid, approaching and being inside the Kremlin walls is something that I could not have imagined as a child, and for my part, remained a bit intimidating to approach.



"Kremlin" means "fortress" and indeed it is. Sixty foot walls, 20 feet thick surround the entire compound. It sits high above the Moscow river and overlooks the entire city. It's also one of the oldest structures there, enduring many attacks and invasions through the centuries. It's sort of a large triangle shaped fortification with a beautiful clock tower with bells on one end.



The Kremlin is where Vladimir Putin works and his administration. Once inside, there was one modern looking administration building (not pictured) and many beautiful older administration buildings, all in a warm gold color that was beautiful against the gently falling snow.



There were also several orthodox churches most designed by Italian architects brought in by the czars. Some churches were for men only, some for women only. One was used for coronations, another for baptisms of czars, and another for their burial.

In the one for burial, many past czars lie in sarcophagi around the worship chamber. In this particular church, there were three men from a choir who sang while we were there.

The acoustics of the room were striking as the men's voices would ring in the chamber like bells long after they finished a note. They would often use this ringing sound to sing harmony against before the 'ring' of it died out entirely. Their singing would add new tones to start ringing against it. It was beautiful, hypnotic, and seemed over too quickly.



Just outside this particular church was an enormous bell cast by one of the czars (sorry, can't remember which just now), but damn... the thing's huge. Look at Jeri next to it. It weighs 200 tons and was cast on site.



We also visited the original patriarch's residence (what the catholic world would think of as a pope) and saw vestments of patriarchs dating back several centuries. Many were amazingly ornate, covered in pearls and woven or embroidered with gold thread.

We then toured the Armory, which sounds like a drab museum filled with guns and weapons. To our delight, it was filled with the treasures of state including a huge collection of the czars carriages, multiple heavy gospels (books) clad in gold and crusted with huge diamonds or emeralds as big as 50 cent pieces, coronation gowns of the czarinas in imaculate condition, the clothes of Peter the Great, diamond crusted swords, ornate guns, huge collections of massive gold and silver amusements or ornaments given to Russia from many countries, fraberge eggs gifted to the czarina, diamond encrusted thrones, and the crown jewels of Russia themselves...


Perhaps the most amazing item was a gift to the czarina of Alexander the Second: a silver dandelion, with delicate, tiny silver rods for the stem of each seed pod shaft, not much thicker than a hair. This shaft was tipped with the actual tuft of a dandelion seed around the end, and in the middle of the tuft was a single, tiny, cut diamond. All was exactly to the scale of a real dandelion in full, white bloom. As you slowly walked past or even turned your head, the sparkle of the tiny diamonds gave the impression of drops of dew glinting in the sunlight. It was something I couldn't have imagined was possible to create. Like the rest, it was incredible.

The enormity of treasure in this building was staggering.


Afterwards, we visited the eternal flame, dedicated to those who fought in the Great Patriotic War (World War II to us). Our tour guide had finished his day with us at this point and we were for the first time, free to roam unattended in Moscow. It was very fun and exciting to be managing in this enormous foreign city on our own.



We found our way through ordering a late lunch at a nearby shopping mall food court and did some shopping (yup, with non-english speakers), then took some good daytime pictures in Red Square and stopped into the GUM (pronounced 'goom') to see how the very wealthy in Moscow shopped. But that's another story.

FRIDAY - The State (Old) Tretyakov Museum

FRIDAY - Today we visited the State Tretyakov Museum (sometimes referred to as the Old Tretyakov Museum) with a personal guide named Irina. Irina met us at the embassy gate and was instantly a pleasure to talk with. She was a retired guide who loved to travel and who had been trained to be a personal guide for visitors to Moscow. It was wonderful to speak directly with someone from the city and learn about her daily life, her family, and her outlook.

Irina helped further our confidence using the metro here (still a bit of a challenge, we don't have the alphabet down yet, plus at least for me, it's the first time I've used the mass transit system of any large city - I'm a taxi guy normally).

On the way to the museum Irina talked about how she loved winter and was so pleased that it had finally started to snow regularly. Until we arrived, there had been very little snow in Moscow. She talked about how clean and fresh the city seemed after a snow, and today was no exception with a gentle snow all day.

She was surprised to learn that we loved winter and snow, and that it was actually colder in Iowa before we left. Irina said, "I love the feel of the cold on my face in the winter - it's refreshing and makes me feel energetic and alive!" Couldn't have said it better myself, Irina.

She started us out with a brief history of Tretyakov himself and of a dozen or so artists from the 19th century who were prominently featured at the museum. It was wonderful information, but I humbly admit... I could keep track of the faces in the photographs... but the names escaped me.

Every name ended in 'kov' 'skov' 'nov' 'lov'.... they all could have just as well been 'Smith' for as much as I was capable of retaining. I thought at that moment it must be an awful bitch to come to the US as a non-native speaker and try to remember the difference between Johnson, Johanssen, Christensen, Hendersen, Mason, Furgason... those names must sound like the same gobbledy-gook to them too.

Then we were into the exhibits. We started with marble and bronze busts and worked our way from the 17th century painters to the early 20th century.

Some paintings were amazing in their photo realism for a picture painted in the 1800s. Some were incredible in their depiction of light, like Arkhip Kuinji's Moonlight on Dneiper, a 5'x8' oil painting that I could not take my eyes off of (sorry the pic here does not do justice). It's the most amazing representation of moonlight I've ever seen. When it was first exhibited in the 1800s, patrons would ask to see where the lantern was that was lighting the piece from behind.

Another picture I couldn't walk away from was Vasily Vereschagin's The Defeated. Office for the Dead, a 12 foot high, 20 foot long canvas so powerful and so somber that you felt you were on that now silent battle field, surrounded by thousands of dead soldiers. You really must click on this image to appreciate it at a larger size.

While there were pastoral scenes and some very heroic landscapes, the paintings that Irina spoke of the most, that Russians visiting the gallery seemed to flock to, and that overwhelmingly populated this cross section of many pre-twentieth century artists were those paintings associated with pain, loss, extreme grief, enormous hardship, and powerful leaders with ruthless behaviors. At first, I thought this represented a national psyche that had been so beaten down that they had finally accepted suffering as an identity as a way of life. I thought this was defeatist and sad.

But as Irina explained the subject matter each painting with a reserved passion and a pride, I came to see these paintings, not as cries of desperation, but as an expression of the pride Russians feel about the history of their country: a people who have prevailed, and worked on, no matter the circumstances, because they must. Because despite bad things happening throughout the centuries, they love their country.

THURSDAY - The New Tretyakov Museum

THURSDAY - It's gotta be odd to see the posting times of the blog here; i'm trying to match 'em to the real times we were at things, but it posts them with central standard time... I'm so confused on what time it is. At best, I'm gettin' 'em in some kind of chronological order. And I think I'm adjusted to the time change.

Ok, so after chocolate, we went to the New Tretyakov Museum with Bill. All modern and contemporary artists painting and sculpting in styles that ranged from realism to avant garde modernism and post-modernism. Tretyakov was kind of analogous to Carnegie in his philanthropy and collecting the work of great Russian artists from around the country for everyone to enjoy.



There's a State Tretyakov Museum that we'll see tomorrow, but today we went to this one and got to it via a sculpture garden that leads to the museum. There were wonderful stone and bronze pieces there and to the far end was a place referred to as "The Graveyard of Fallen Monuments." Here many of the monuments that were torn down or graffitied at the end of the Cold War. The founder of the KGB, a huge, beautiful Soviet seal with hammer & sickle surrounded by sheaves of wheat, and a special exhibit for Stalin that also includes a wall that symbolizes all the people who died during his reign.


Further on from this is the New Tretyakov, and the modern pieces in it were fun, hopeful, colorful, and uplifting. It's truly a new generation of artists who seem to be looking forward, seeing the potential for a new Russia.

From large modernist koi paintings to bronzes of playful animals,to realist landscapes, to an oil painting of a construction scene that actually came out of the wall as real framing and scaffolds, to a large exhibit of all-nude charcoals, cast bronze, and pencil self-portraits by a woman, who was boldly seated in her own exhibit (yup, we asked if that was her... that's some serious fortitude!), the Tretyakov was filled with wonderful, creativity.