From Russia …

The Romanov Tombs 

You need to know your iconostasis from your elbow and not muddle them up with a reredos in Russian churches. But let’s get back to my childhood at Barmeath. My grandfather was a fount of knowledge and I lapped it up, like I slurp gin now. The general sense of the story was more important to him than getting bogged down in tedious detail; so I believed my forebear, José de Mendoza y Rios, was mathematician to the Tsar. He may have been but certainly he was a foreign member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Anyway, I am in St Petersburg to sniff the cold damp air that he may have inhaled.

Boris Godunov is buried in a monastery not far from Moscow and he’s not a Romanov so needn’t detain us. Almost all the Romanov rulers of Russia are buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral inside the P&P fortress island in St Petersburg. January is low season in St P as there’s hardly any daylight but the likelihood of plenty of sleet and rain. On the plus side there are few tourists; airport, palaces and hotel are empty. But we must crack on to the cadavers of the Tsars, their wives and children. All the tombs, except for two, are of Carrera marble but they do not house the bones. Bones are buried two metres below the floor, Vera, our cultured guide imparted. You may know this mnemonic poem. If you don’t, it’s how to remember almost all the kings and queens of England.

Willie Willie Harry Stee

Harry Dick John Harry three;

One two three Neds, Richard two

Harrys four five six… then who?

Edwards four five, Dick the bad,

Harrys (twain),  Ned six (the lad);

Mary, Bessie, James you ken,

Then Charlie, Charlie, James again…

Will and Mary, Anna Gloria,

Georges four, Will four Victoria;

Edward seven next, and then

Came George the fifth in nineteen ten;

Ned the eighth soon abdicated

Then George six was coronated;

After which Elizabeth

And that’s all folks until her death.

As there doesn’t seem to be a Russian equivalent I learnt about the Tsars from looking at their tombs. This proved essential to put further sightseeing in context. The Romanov dynasty ruled from 1613 when the seventeen year-old Michael I was elected Tsar until 1917 when Nicholas II abdicated and was murdered with his wife, family and servants the following year. Their bodies were recovered and buried in the cathedral in July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their death. We reflected on this in a side chapel listening to Gregorian chant sung for us by four choristers.

Later we visited a shop where I bought this tasteful souvenir of the House of Windsor.

The Battle of the Palaces

I don’t think it’s extravagant to have winter and summer duvets. The rulers of Russia thought it quite comme il faut to have winter and summer palaces. What is perhaps less well known, they knocked them down or left them unfinished when fashion changed. The main protagonists in this “battle” were Catherine the Great and her son, Paul I. Here is Catherine’s palace.

Her son hired Palladian architect, Charles Cameron, and came up with this very different palace. The dome reminds me of Ickworth in Suffolk, built at about the same time.

Meanwhile back at home Chiswick House has been “decorated” to celebrate Chinese New Year – oh dear.