Uglich & Yaroslavl

Friday, May 21, 2010

Uglich

According to the day’s programme we were to arrive at Uglich at 2:00 pm but we tied up at 11:00, the expected delays at the locks didn’t occur. Uglich is an historic town on the Volga River, local tradition dates the town's origins to 937, it was first documented in 1148 as Ugliche Pole (Corner Field), the town's name is thought to allude to the nearby turn in the Volga River.

During the reign of Ivan the Terrible the town passed to his only brother, Yuri. After Ivan's death, his youngest son Dimitry Ivanovich was banished to Uglich in 1584. The most famous event in the town's history took place on May 15, 1591 when the 10-year old boy was found dead with his throat cut in the palace courtyard. Suspicion immediately fell on the tsar's chief advisor, Boris Godunov . Official investigators concluded however that Dimitry's death was an accident. They cut a "tongue" from the cathedral bell that rung the news of Dimitry's death and "exiled" it to Siberia.

The Romanov tsars made it their priority to canonize the martyred tsarevitch and to turn Uglich into a place of Pilgrimage. On the spot where Dimitriy had been murdered the city in 1690 built the small Church of St Demetrios on the Blood, with its red walls and blue domes. This church is very prominent as we approached the town on the Volga.

After lunch we went on a walking tour of this small town, having to run the gauntlet of 150 m. of souvenir stalls. Our walk first took us to the Cathedral of Our Saviour’s Transfiguration and then on to St Demetrios Church. After these visits we were treated to a concert by five male singers, who sang a number of religious and traditional songs. Wandering back to the ship we sailed at 6:00 pm.

In the evening as the boat sailed through Rybinskoye Reservoir on the Volga River, we were treated to a lovely sunset at 10:30 pm.

The reservoir was created in the mid 1930s when Stalin constructed the canal to complete the system from Moscow to St Petersburg, it didn’t worry him that 700 villages were flooded and thousands of people displaced. The reservoir is so large that it takes seven hours to sail across it.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Yaroslavl

Like yesterday our boat arrived several hours before the expected time and when we looked out our window at 6:00 am we were already moored.

The city founded in 1010 is preparing to celebrate its 1000^th year in September and there are several major building projects under way. The most spectacular is the rebuilding of a major cathedral destroyed by Stalin in the 1930s. In this decade Stalin destroyed thousands of Churches all through Russia and in many cases used the materials to build apartment blocks on the site.

We left at 8:00 for a tour of the city, driving past many churches and old buildings and arriving at the confluence of the local river, Kotorosi and the Volga.

From there we were taken to a small art gallery where there was a display of lacquer ware from four villages, each with a different style. Only one colour is applied at a time and then a coat of lacquer and polished and then the next colour so there may be twenty layers before the picture is finished, many of the colours are applied by a single hair brush.

Prices for the boxes range from around $120 to $6,000

From the gallery we drove to one of the oldest churches in the city which dates back to the 17th Century and belongs to the so-called Yaroslavl type (built of red brick, with bright tiled exteriors). This was the Church of Elijah the Prophet which has some of the most impressive frescoes in this region and apart from cleaning the candle soot from them they haven’t needed any restoration even after over 300 years from when they were painted.

Returning to the boat we sailed at noon for our next port, Goritzy