In the Urals- Ad

We're in the Urals!

Yekatarinburg- what a great name for a place. It's a nice city too. (I'm getting good at blocking out the grey concrete slabs of buildings). It was built by Peter the Great and named in honour of his wife Catherine and so, much like St Petersburg, it was a planned city and has a couple of wide tree lined boulevards; especially beautiful at this autumnal time of year.

Today we went on a tour where we got to have one foot in Asia and one foot in Europe. We even got a fancy certificate. We might frame this with our 'I crossed the Artic Circle' certificate and hang them in the pool room when we get our own place...

Our tour guide was lovely too and spoke great English- so we took the opportunity to ask loads of questions that had been building up over the weeks in Russia. "How can we tell if we are going to get a meal on the train- sometimes we do, sometimes we don't", "how many weeks holidays do teachers have a year", "we keep seeing the word 'traktor' outside restaurants, what does it mean and why are there no menus or prices on the outside of restaurants?" etc. You know, all the really hard hitting journalistic questions.

The other more sombre part of the tour took us to where they found the remains of the Romanov dynasty (Tsar Alexander, his wife, their 4 daughters and the heir Alexei) who were executed here in Yekatarinburg (then Sevastapol) in 1917. There are now 6 churches there (and they are putting the finishing touches to a 7th). Interestingly, they have not built the churches exactly where they found the remains but where the family were temporarily & hastily buried in 1917 (in the mines) and then dug up and moved elsewhere a couple of days later. We also saw where the actual remains where buried until discovered in 1978. They have a simple momument here and a couple of plaques. It's a bit blink and you miss it, off the beaten track, in the woods just near a rail line, passed the pot-holed path, bog and large above ground pipe so it doesn't look like many people visit, but that just makes is seem more respectful to me.

Later we also visited the new Church of the Blood; built in 2000 on the site of the merchant's house whose cellar they were murdered in. Most interesting to me was the fact that the entire family have now been canonised (since 2000 in Russia, earlier in the overseas Russian Church). They even have their own icons painted where the family are all wearing halos and look a lot like the ultimate holy family (but with added daughters). Is this a public recognition of the saintly link between the monarchy and the church? Is it attribution for the massacre of a stately family? Hard to know...