Never one to pass up an opportunity to visit somewhere new, on
Sunday I travelled to Углич (Uglich) with Beth, Joe, Katie, Andy, Flora, Ben, Ed,
Sean and Alexia.
As Uglich was said to be a two-hour bus ride away, it was an early
start, and by 9.15 Joe, Andy, Beth, Katie and I were at the station ready for
the 9.40 bus. When we got to the ticket kiosk, it turned out that the bus times
on the Internet had been wrong yet again, and that the bus didn't actually
leave until 10am. At least we hadn't missed it this time. Feeling early and
well-prepared, we sat in the small waiting room until the bus arrived, only
slightly concerned that the time on our tickets was actually 14.10 instead of 10.05,
as we had been so clear with the ticket-seller we assumed the ticket machine
was simply not calibrated. When we tried to get on the bus, however, the surly
bus driver insisted that as the time on the ticket was incorrect, we had to go
back to the kiosk or he would not let us on the bus. It was a stressful few
minutes but we made it just in time.
Once we were safely on the bus ourselves we decided it would be a
good idea to let the others know what was going on, as they hadn't even arrived
at the station yet. Convinced they wouldn't make it in time, we explained how
the bus was about to leave, but that there was another one at 11 o’clock. A few
minutes later they were running onto the bus; the churlish bus driver had
obviously decided to change the rules, as these people seem to love doing.
The journey was shorter than the three hours we’d been expecting,
and by 12.15 we were in Uglich and ready to begin the day. On our way into town
we visited the Богаявленский монастыр (Epiphany Monastery) a
large but unimposing walled-in courtyard containing two slightly dilapidated churches
that have clearly been left to ruin since Soviet times. The exterior walls are
crumbling in places and on one side the brick is no longer whitewashed but
completely exposed. The frescoes on the inside have been whitewashed over to save money on upkeep, and in one of
the churches just one faded painting remains, an icon wearing a slightly
melancholy expression, as if he knows that he is soon to meet the same
undignified end after all these hundreds of years. Aside from the walls, the
rest of the church has also been stripped, leaving just an empty, eerie shell.
(Despite this, visitors still have to pay to take photographs inside). The other
church has maintained more of its furniture and some of its icons, including a
painting of the last family of tsars, in which they are all sainted (which
comes across as slightly sacrilegious, to say the least).
The cold was biting that morning, so after seeing the monastery we
made our way into town to find a café where we could warm up and grab a bite to
eat. After a quick lunch, where a moody waitress managed to upset half the
group and caused us to split into two, those of us still remaining went
straight onto the Kremlin, which was slightly set back from the town centre,
overlooking the banks of the Volga.
It was an unusual Kremlin, without the high surrounding walls and
large open courtyard which generally serve to make the Kremlin a self-contained
unit. This Kremlin consists of the Спасо- Церковь Царевича Димитрия «на поле» (Church of the Tsarevitch Dmitri,
1798-1814), Палаты дворца угличских удельных князей (Palace Chambers of
the Uglich Princes, 1480), and the Преображенский собор (Transfiguration Church, 1700-1706) and колокопьня (bell tower), which were both destroyed and rebuilt in the 18th
century. It was well worth the 50r entry fee to the bell tower to enjoy the picturesque
views of the town and the river, but the churches all required tickets and a
glimpse inside was enough to get the impression that they followed the typical
Russian style of decoration.
With the help of Joe’s trusty guidebook, we then made our way along
the bank of the Volga to the Воскресенский монастыр (Resurrection
Monastery), getting a glimpse on the way of the Казанская церковь (Kazan
Church) and the Церковь рождества Ионна Предтечи (Church of
the Nativity of John the Baptist), which was built in
1689-90 by a local merchant to commemorate the spot where his son had drowned.
The Resurrection Monastery consists of a huge cathedral, refectory, belfry and
summer church, which all stand in a row and date back to 1674-77. We were lucky
enough to get a look inside the cathedral this time, as the nuns were friendly
and made us feel more than welcome.
We had now seen the main sights of the area and decided to make
our way to the Экспозиция «Мифы и суеверия русского народа» (a privately-run exhibition of myths and
superstitions of the Russian people). The museum itself was a wooden building
tucked away down a side road, with only a rustic wooden sign to indicate its
existence. We tentatively rang the bell and, after a few minutes a tall,
bearded man opened the gate and welcomed us inside. He was middle-aged and
thick-set with a clear, strong voice – in short, we agreed, everything we
expected a typical Russian man to be. He asked me if everyone would be ok if he
led the tour in Russian, took our money (60r/£1.20 each) and began to explain
the strange exhibits on show in the first room.
The exhibition, which was spread into only
three small rooms and comprised a collection of objects representing a variety
of Russian folk stories, was a brilliant insight into the Russian provincial
people and a great test of our language skills. Strangely, amongst all the
difficult vocabulary the guide used, the only word he stopped to explain was полночь (midday), in all probability the
easiest word he had used throughout the tour. Maybe it had been the only word
he had felt able to explain, but at any rate it was well-meant and he seemed
glad of our interest. At the end of the tour we were allowed to look closer at
all the objects (some of which were eerie life-size models of strange hags and
creatures), before we thanked him and he walked us to the gate.
With just a couple of hours to spare before the
bus home, we made our way to the vodka museum, stopping at the local souvenir
market on the way. There we bumped into the others, who told us, to our
disappointment, that the vodka museum had closed at 3pm and we had all missed
it. Nevertheless, we were happy to look around the market and by the time we
had finished, we had less than an hour so decided to return to the café from
earlier and have a warming drink before making our way back to the bus station.
We reached the bus station only to discover
that there were no more free spaces on the 5.20 bus, so we would have to wait
for the next one, which was luckily only an hour later. We filled the time by
walking up to the nearby Алексеевский монастыр (Alexeievsky monastery), whose
three-tented church is considered a beautiful example of Russian medieval
architecture. The church’s present state, however, only creates an impression
of depressed remains, with its crumbling walls and dilapidated roof. It has
clearly been left to ruin for some time.
By this time the sun was beginning to set, casting
stunning beams on the many church domes emerging from between the trees and
houses of the suburbs of Uglich. It is a beautiful little town, but somehow sad
in its isolation from the real world, with its little wooden houses and side
streets that trail off into the countryside. I was glad I had seen another town
on the Golden Ring, and starting to get a real feel of Russian provincial life.
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