Sights in Northern European Russia
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Krayevyedchesky Museum
The varied exhibits of the Krayevyedchesky Museum include good features on Sami and Pomor history and the Anglo-American occupation. There's a good souvenir shop, and museum guides can be hired for city tours in English.
reviewed
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Geological Museum
The town’s neat, widely spaced concrete-block architecture is hardly an attraction, but there’s a new, central Geological Museum
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History, Architecture & Art Museum
Today the kremlin houses the main exhibits of the city's History, Architecture & Art Museum. Forty-minute kremlin tours in English are available from the excursions department (722 511) in the Gavriilovsky Korpus. The museum's history and natural history section, in the same building, ranges from stuffed wildlife to stuff on Stalin's periods of exile in Vologda.
Those with a morbid streak will appreciate the female skeleton from the 2nd century BC and the astounding, Hieronymus Bosch-like anonymous painting from 1721, Strashny Sud (Frightful Trial).
The museum's art section on the east side of the main courtyard includes some astonishing examples of Vologda lace and embro…
reviewed
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Lake Semyonovskoe
Atop the hill 2km north of pl Pyat Uglov, Lake Semyonovskoe is the focus of the largest open space near the centre and a favourite playground for Murmansk. The lake is named after the would-be hermit Semyon Korzhnev, an old tsarist soldier who retired at the turn of the 20th century to a cabin on the shore and was the only resident for miles around. Imagine his disappointment when Murmansk appeared on his utopian horizon!
The lake and indeed much of Murmansk are overlooked by Alyosha, a truly gigantic concrete Great Patriotic War soldier from whose feet you can enjoy spectacular views over the city. The lake is frozen for much of the year but in summer people swim and boa…
reviewed
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B
Museum of Diplomatic Corps
This unusual two-room museum chronicles a little-known blip in WWI history. In February 1918, with the Germans approaching Petrograd, Allied ambassadors were ordered to evacuate. US ambassador David Francis suggested simply relocating. Studying a map, he chose Vologda. Other embassies followed his lead, the French, Italian and Serbian ministries sharing a luxury rail carriage parked in Vologda station. That proved handy since in July all the embassies decamped again to Arkhangelsk. The eclectic and impressively researched exhibit has some notes in English and is housed in the former US embassy, a tired if once-grand timber house with a four-pillar wooden portico.
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Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery
This working Spaso-Prilutsky monastery, dating from the 14th century, rises beside the Vologda River on the northern outskirts of the city. It's a beautiful place even though visitors are restricted to limited areas inside. Standard modest dress and covered heads for women are required.
The upper church of the five-domed Transfiguration Cathedral (Spaso-Preobrazhensky sobor), built in the 16th century, is still in the early stages of restoration, but the lower church is full of icons and holds services. Behind is the beautiful, wooden Dormition Church (Uspenskaya tserkov), built in 1519 with a single spire and an equal-armed cross plan.
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Museum of the Northern Fleet
Naval buffs make the trek to the Museum of the Northern Fleet covering the founding of Russia’s first navy in Arkhangelsk, the Murmansk convoys of WWII and the modern fleet. The museum is within a turquoise, somewhat crumbling three-storey cultural centre fronted by anchors. Take bus 10 to the penultimate stop (‘Nakhimova’, opposite ul Admirala Lobova 43), walk on for 300m, then turn left and it’s 80m up ul Tortseva. Shimmy through the building’s foyer and the museum is to the left, within.
reviewed
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Gostiny Dvor
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Arkhan-gelsk’s raison d’être was the Gostiny Dvor, a grand, turreted brick trading centre built between 1668 and 1684. Luxurious European textiles, satin and velvet arrived here while flax, hemp, wax and timber for ships’ masts were exported. The once-huge complex is now only a shadow of its former self but some partly restored sections host exhibition rooms that usually have a couple of worthwhile historical and/or art displays.
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Art Gallery
Arkhangelsk’s most compelling art gallery jams together a remarkable selection of 18th- to early-20th-century Russian paintings ranging stylistically from Stanislav Khlebovsky’s very operatic Death of Prince Oranskogo (1861) to Pili Petrovichev’s impres-sionist Beryozy (Birches, 1917). Upstairs are impressive icons, bone carvings and decorative art displays. However, the building containing all these delights is an architectural crime against humanity.
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Geological Museum
The bright new Geological Museum is open to drop-in guests. Labelled mineral fragments are sold here as souvenirs. By appointment, more specialist visitors can arrange a guided visit to a second Mineralogy Collection on the top floor of the next-door Kola Scientific Centre. Friendly academics speak English but if you don’t have the geological background to pose relevant questions you’re likely to feel embarrassingly out of your depth.
reviewed
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Sami History & Culture Museum
Under Stalin, the once-nomadic Sami (Lapp) people were brutally suppressed and forcibly collectivised. Of Russia’s roughly 1600 Sami, some 900 now live in the tiny administrative village of Lovozero (Luyavvr) where a little Sami History & Culture Museum displays 2000-year-old petroglyphs and sells various Sami crafts including reindeer-fur slippers and carved bone-work. Staff can arrange English-speaking translator-guides.
reviewed
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D
Museum of the History of the Exploration & Development of Northern European Russia
To the non-geologist, Apatity's most interesting museum is the Museum of the History of the Exploration & Development of Northern European Russia, which has explanations in English. It features Russian Arctic expeditions (with unique drawings of Novaya Zemlya) and interesting archaeological material on the Kanozero and Chalmny-Varre petroglyphs and the nine ancient labyrinths around the Kola coast. There are also old Sami and Pomor artefacts.
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Fine Arts Museum
The Fine Arts Museum is surprisingly good. It boasts an impressive selection of 14th- to 18th-century icons and a good selection of 18th-to-early-20th-century Russian painting, with work by nearly all the leading names - look for Stanislav Khlebovsky's Death of Prince Oranskogo (1861) and IB Lampi's portrait of Catherine the Great (1790s). On the 2nd floor, don't overlook the 19th- and early-20th-century textiles and decorative art.
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Kraevedchesky Museum
The extensive Kraevedchesky Museum is in the 17th century Gavriilovsky Korpus. Beyond all the stuffed mammals (go on, make that bear growl) is a rich prehistory section including a 3500-year-old lady skeleton clasping at her modesty. Look for the Hieronymus Bosch–like 1721 painting Strashny Sud, in which demons, angels and endless salmon-pink humanoids fight out the final tribulations of eternity.
reviewed
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Mineralogical Museum
The Kola Scientific Centre's Mineralogical Museum, with 900 samples of Kola Peninsula minerals, rocks and ores, is a little more specialist than the Geological Museum but the colourful minerals from the Khibiny-Lovozero massif will impress anyone. Officially, visits should be prearranged, but if you ask at the reception desk of the building they'll probably send you on up to the museum.
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Museum
One of several fine old wooden buildings at the northern end of Leningradskaya houses this lovable little museum evoking the life of a 19th century, 17-child middle-class family. Amid portraits and old dolls are musical boxes and an old gramophone that still plays. A selection of beautiful photos showcase other examples of Vologda’s historic wooden architecture.
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Statue of Yury Andropov
Unveiled to protests and arrests in 2005, a very youthful statue of Yury Andropov commemorates the USSR’s 1982–84 supremo who had been chief of Petrozavodsk’s Komsomol (Communist Party youth wing) some 50 years earlier. Andropov is best remembered as a long-term KGB director. Was the statue a sign of President Putin rehabilitating his former boss?
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Afghan War Memorial
An Afghan War Memorial lists locals who died in the conflict. It's hard to track down though: if you can find ul Leningradskaya 19 (behind which is an awesome view of the parks and lake), it's just south of that, on a hill above the river. The adjacent dirt road, Volnaya ul, leads to two interesting side-by-side cemeteries, one Jewish and one Russian Orthodox.
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St Procopio’s Cathedral
St Procopio’s Cathedral has a stone purported to grant your wish if you sit on it. Clear your mind, and look at the church complex across the wide, unbridged river. At sunset peaceable gaggles of artists, fishermen, lovers and wobbly old pensioners dot the wide sweep of grassy river-front serenaded by cooing pigeons.
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Museum
The historical section in this museum has strikingly presented sections on the Soviet-era timber industry, Gulag camps and notably WWII, when the city was pounded by 2100 German bombing runs and survived largely thanks to supply convoys from Scotland. Downstairs the Nature Section is a lumpy taxidermy collection.
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Kremlin
Vologda's kremlin is the city's historical centrepiece, a 17th-century fortified enclosure of churches, archbishop's chambers and other handsome buildings. It was built as a church administrative centre to accompany St Sofia's Cathedral next door, whose domes and bell tower greatly enhance the beauty of the kremlin's courtyards.
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St Sofia’s Cathedral
Powerful five-domed St Sofia’s Cathedral has a soaring interior fully covered with beautiful 1680s frescoes which, to some untutored eyes, look more attractive than the more famous Unesco-listed ones at Ferapontovo. The astonishingly tall iconostasis is filled with darkly brooding saintly portraiture.
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‘Residence’
A good central starting point for exploring the town’s historic centre is Ded Moroz’s part-time ‘residence’ where the Russian Santa shows up at festival times. There’s a ‘throne room’ and a lacklustre exhibition room.
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Museum of Forgotten Things
Housed in a restored home with period furniture, this interactive museum aims to impart an understanding of Russian life in the 19th century. Guests are encouraged to attempt to set the dining-room table with imperial china, play period music on a gramophone and learn the complicated norms of receiving guests.
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Church of St John the Baptist
Before the revolution, on pl Revolyutsii there were three churches and one grand cathedral. Only the Church of St John the Baptist (1710-17) survived. The church makes an ironic backdrop for the very first Lenin statue ever erected in the USSR, back in 1924, and possibly the only one that's life-size.
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