Kizhi

Friday, May 27, 2011

Barbara was a little under the weather yesterday, but feels better today.  Maybe we should start drinking vodka shots when we get home.  Today we are traveling north on Lake Onega, the second largest lake in Europe.  We will travel about 100 miles to the island of Kizhi, which is about 310 miles from the Arctic Circle.  The location is 35° E and 62° N.  The trip will take us 6 hours from the south end of the lake to the north and another 6 hours back to the south.  This morning we had an interesting tour of the bridge.  It’s the only day we could have a tour, as the ship is on auto-pilot on this large lake.  There are more than 1,300 islands on Lake Onega.  Our destination was the small island of Kizhi, which currently has 60 residents, mostly retired folks.  The island is famous for its open-air architectural museum, which contains several examples of 18th century wooden structures.  The Church of the Transfiguration was built in 1714.  It is being renovated and we could not go inside.  It was built without using a single nail (the shingles were attached by nails, however) and has 22 onion domes made of timber.  The Church of the Intercession was built in 1764 and is considered the winter church, as it is heated.  It was open to us and we saw icons dating to the time the church was built.  We also visited Oshevneva house, built in 1876.  It is typical of the homes of the time and was often multi-family.  This site on Kizhi island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was luckily not destroyed by the communists.  We did a ship’s quiz today and didn’t do too badly--we think we got 24 of 28 right.  It wasn’t easy, but one couple had a perfect score.  The questions were all multiple choice, but one question was Putin’s age, another about our guide Valera’s metric shoe size and two questions involved writing “please” and “thank you” in Cyrillic letters.  We had a Russian language lesson today but it’s pretty hopeless.  We haven’t gotten beyond nyet (no), da (yes), dobroe utro (good morning) and spasiba (thank you).  The Cyrillic alphabet is very difficult.  We had a very pleasant dinner with a Dutch couple who now live in England.

Photos

Today was our coolest day so far, about 54 for a high, but very comfortable.  We are close to the Arctic Circle where the weather in spring is often rainy and windy.  We were fortunate to have such a pleasant day.

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