Wednesday, June 8
Yaroslavl

Today started off with one of those milestone moments. We were sailing along through bright sunshine in a really broad part of the canal—a lake, really—when we got to the lock that marked our entry into the Volga. It was hard not to hum when I went out to photograph the statue of Mother Volga. I have to say, it’s not as impressive as Germania, the statue along the Rhine, but we couldn’t have asked for better conditions for making photographs.

We cruised on down the Volga, passing one town after another, starting with Rybinsk, where the lock let us into the Volga, with churches left and right. The difference in the landscape between what we saw there and what we had seen on Kizhi Island was striking. Up north, trees were barely in leaf and birch trees were everywhere. Along the Volga we saw summer everywhere, in the trees, grass, flowers, and even in the clothing people wore. The trees were more familiar to me, especially the pines. I’m just guessing that a lot of the other trees were Lindens, but that’s just the influence of Richard Ward. He always says trees are lindens if he doesn’t know what they are.

Our goal for the day was one of the Golden Ring towns important in Russian History: Yaroslavl. Today Yaroslavl is a fairly large city, not just a country town, and it’s still an important part of the Russian economy. It wasn’t a surprise to find our shore excursion concentrated on the historic center, and this time we actually saw places other than churches. Not that we didn’t see those, of course. We even visited a puppet theatre. Really. A relatively new theatre built specifically for puppet performances. The building itself was quite appealing, but I was struck more by the displays of hand-painted lacquer boxes for sale in the upper lobby. More on that later.

We started a nice walking tour of part of the city at the WWII Memorial in the middle of a very long narrow park in the city. We got one surprise along the way when we were ushered into a small auditorium for a short performance by a “choir”—four men. For the most part, I’ve stopped buying CDs on these trips, but I came home with two of theirs. Wow.

From there we continued our walking tour by rounding the Church of the Assumption and discovering the bells for a full carillon. Large bells, small bells, the whole shebang. The Church is a new one, and it’s really striking. When we started our walk at the WWII Memorial, I thought we would go inside, but that didn’t happen. But finding those bells was a surprise bigger than the one I had when we heard the guys sing. It turns out that the bells were commissioned, but the funds ran out before the Bell tower was built. So there they are, hanging from frames built in and fenced beside the church. We didn’t get a video, but you can search YouTube and hear them.

One of the things that struck me here, like it did in St. Petersburg, was the number of public spaces, primarily parks, we saw in our bus rides from point to point. Some were really striking, and one in particular was quite stunning. Maybe that was just because of our view point. After we passed by the bells and tossed a coin or two into a sort of fun sculpture with a pool, we walked just a little farther to the of the park. There we were on a bluff overlooking a strikingly laid out park below us, at the confluence of two rivers. Check out the bear outlined in the central planting. Yaroslav the Wise, like Davy Crockett, killed a bear, and it was on that spot that he founded the city. We would see a lot of bear images that day.

We walked back through the “strip park,” boarded the buses again, and took off for the Church of Elijah. This is an ancient church, and our guide was excellent. Other than the iconostasis, the walls here are covered not with mosaics but with murals that have been carefully restored. Really striking. The Judgment Day mural on the back wall has a monstrous serpent that moves around many, many images of botht he blessed and the damned. Kind of fun to see.

After spending some time there, we were on our own for a while. Judy and I started down a pedestrian street, spotted a cafe, and sat outdoors to enjoy a Russian beer and watch people for a while. This was the first time we had found ourselves in a situation where our servers didn’t know much English. One of them just stared blankly at us and went to get someone else. The menu had photos of every dish, so my guess is they’re accustomed to foreign tourists, although their clientele might be Russian for the most part. We were joined by another couple from the River Victoria, and just getting to sit there and enjoy a little down time was fun.

It may seem like I’ve included too many photographs of sunsets. That’s possible, but with all the nice reflections, how could I refuse? Here’s the last one for this trip.