Category: Places

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V. A Trip to Sergiyev Posad

Sergiyev Posad, of course, is where all this is heading, a town seventy kilometres to the north-east of Moscow and my only excursion outside the capital city. For the hour-long journey, we catch a train from the Yaroslavsky terminal. My son is disappointed that it won’t be one of the newer trains, he says trains to the north-east are the last to be modernized, but it looks fine to me. We will pass through Mytishchi, which my son jokes every visitor to Moscow must go to because a friend of his lives there. We record a short video in which I say what a nice city it is. I see greenery, snaking rivers, houses instead of blocks, lots of tin huts with chimneys poking out of them. I imagine what the scene would look like if it was covered in snow. It’s not as lush as Bulgaria, the climate here is more severe, and the trees are several weeks behind Sofia.

Sergiyev Posad is where the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius is located, Russian Orthodoxy’s spiritual centre. I have wanted to go there for a long time. Not only does it contain the relics of Russia’s most important saint, St Sergius of Radonezh, who lived in the fourteenth century, but the same church that contains his relics houses probably the most famous icon in the world, the Trinity by Andrei Rublev. Russia is famous for three icons: the Trinity; the Vladimir icon of the Mother and Child, which I have seen in the main cathedral in Moscow (at a distance, behind bulletproof glass), a twelfth-century icon sent by the Patriarch of Constantinople to the Grand Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy of Kiev which is said to have protected Moscow from an invasion by Timur in 1395; and the Kazan icon of the Mother and Child, the original of which was lost in 1904 (the robbers were interested in the frame, not the icon itself!), so there are only copies, of which I venerated one on the Kolomenskoye estate, in the church associated with Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, father of Peter the Great, next to the avenue of lime trees and opposite the former site of his wooden palace.

When we arrive in Sergiyev Posad, we walk along the platform and cross the tracks to exit through a barrier. I can glimpse a gold dome in the distance. The town reminds me of a settlement in the Wild West with a main street and not much else. The buildings are ugly, but this is not the point of our visit. We head right, and then left, emerging onto a patch of grass with the Konchura River flowing through it, which offers an attractive view of our destination. My son again takes me a different way, past a memorial of military glory, which really holds little interest for me, until at last I find myself in front of the monastery gate. It is a Sunday, and there is a constant trickle of pilgrims, but nothing overwhelming. I pause for photos in front of the entrance. As we enter, we pass frescoes of St Sergius greeting a flock of doves – his future disciples – and blessing Prince Dmitry Donskoy before he meets the Tatar army at the Battle of Kulikovo, two pivotal moments in the saint’s life, which represent his spiritual authority and legacy.

Inside the enclosure proper, we pass the Dormition Cathedral on the right. There is the grave of an elder, which is recent (beneath wood, not stone) and covered in flowers, attracting the attention of numerous pilgrims, some of whom must have known him when he was alive. We then pass the Church of the Holy Spirit, its white walls blazing for a moment in the light of the sun, which emerges briefly from the clouds, and join the queue outside the Trinity Cathedral to venerate the saint’s relics. The wind is biting, but I do not mind this. Actually I like the fact of waiting. It gives you time to reflect and creates a bond with the people around you. A woman comes out and asks us to queue next to the church wall, not out into the square. We are given books of prayers in Russian to the saint. As often in Russian churches, we will enter the church from the side. I have found entrances in Moscow confusing – you’re never quite sure where they are, and when you do find them, you’re never quite sure which part of the building you are in.

Here, however, on entering the church, we find ourselves in the narthex, candles flaring, those for the living on brass stands that are higher than those for the departed, the metal gleaming where it has been oiled to prevent the wax from sticking. Women busily scrub away, keeping the surfaces clean. The nave is on our left. We turn the corner and, as if entering Noah’s ark, are lined up so that we approach the relics two by two. I’m just glad my son is next to me, and not with someone else. I gaze around, searching for the icon of the Trinity, which I imagine will be in the centre of the church, not on the iconostasis itself, but I am wrong. There is one Trinity to the left of the holy doors, next to the Mother, but I do not think it is this one. To the right of the holy doors, where Christ would normally be… Yes, this is it. I feel certain that this is it, and I sneak a photograph of the image. I know that photography is not permitted, but I also know that Russians love their mobile phones. It is time to turn my attention to the relics, which are in a silver shrine against the wall, to the far right of the iconostasis. A man beckons people forwards, helps them bow, and then urges them on. Orthodoxy is all about movement. People make the sign of the cross. A choir sings – a moleben, perhaps, or an akathist to the saint. The most common words in an Orthodox service are a plea for mercy: “Lord, have mercy.” I am carried forwards, as if on a wave. I see the opening. The face is covered, unlike in Greek churches, where the face is often visible. I bow down and kiss the glass, touch it with my forehead, and kiss it again. I have waited so long for this moment. Already I am descending the steps, back to the nave proper. I do not remember having ascended them. I join the huddle of the choir, turn back in the direction of the relics, I need more time, and begin to pray. And then something very strange happens.

It is as if a channel opens up. I have never experienced anything like this before. It is as if the saint himself is listening. I pray in silence, but feel as if my words are magnified in heaven, are reaching right to God’s throne through the saint’s intervention. I stutter out my prayers, my meagre requests. It is as if I have been asking to see someone important in order to let my thoughts be known, and now I have been given the opportunity, I feel rather flustered. Whereas our words normally form a thread, which may or may not reach its destination, my words now are a thoroughfare, a broad boulevard, a royal road. A link has been enabled between me and heaven, and the one who has done this is lying a few feet in front of me. I know it cannot go on forever and must come to an end. What it would be to enjoy such discourse on a permanent basis! Faith is the enlarging of things. Faith is sight and hearing. So often in this world we feel undervalued, overlooked, when, like the animals in Moscow Zoo, all we want is to be acknowledged – not to engage in trade, not to engage in trickery or deceit, but to be ourselves, fully open. We spend so much time immersed in conflict, but when we meet our own fragility, our own breathlessness, I do not think we have the strength to wish anyone ill. When facing the firing squad in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Arcadio realizes how much he really loved the people he hated most. In death, in fragility, there is no room for hostility.

We leave the church and head back to the frontier town. We eat a pizza in Dodo’s. I cannot stop smiling. This is the perfect conclusion to my visit, and I experience enormous gratitude. Orthodoxy is about endurance, something I think people in the West do not understand. You endure, despite the hardships, the obvious persecution. It is not about convenience. It is about being pushed to the limit, to the edge of time itself, and peering over into the chasm of eternity. A saint who has been dead for 650 years opens up the gate to heaven for me. I feel more alive than I have for ages. And I smile, because my son is opposite me. I am not alone. My life has meaning.

  1. In front of the Trinity Lavra.
  2. St Sergius blessing Prince Dmitry.
  3. The wall of the Church of the Holy Spirit with the Trinity Cathedral on the left.
  4. The queue outside the Trinity Cathedral.
  5. My photo of the Trinity icon, which forms part of the iconostasis in the position normally occupied by Christ.
  6. The Trinity icon in relation to the shrine of St Sergius on the right.
  7. In Dodo Pizza.

Jonathan Dunne

Back to the beginning: Red Square

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IV. Moscow Life

The first thing I learn in Moscow is the importance of the metro, which is said to transport ten million people a day. I am given a Troika card, which I can use to travel as much as I like (it costs eight euros for three days). My favourite line is my son’s line, of course – number 9 – and my favourite station is Borovitskaya – right to the heart of the Kremlin. On my first day, I stand on the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, the wind blowing down a cold and grey Moscow River, and gaze at the Kremlin towers behind me and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour ahead. The gold dome is under scaffolding. I will visit it later on the same day, but I make the mistake of approaching the side facing the river, imagining that this will be the main entrance, when in fact the main entrance faces the other way. I’m still confused by this – how could you not face the river?

I eat my sandwich and crisps, still in Bulgaria wilderness mode. After this, I will take to having lunch in some of my son’s favourite restaurants. There is no McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken, but they have been replaced by Russian equivalents: Vkusno i tochka and Rostic’s (which I mispronounce Rustic’s), which are just as good, if not better. The idea that Russia is straining under the weight of western sanctions is quickly dispelled by a visit to the local mall, where the first thing I see is a large, well-lit western clothes store. Other western products are on offer: cosmetics, for example, or shoes. And where such products do not exist, Russians are more than capable of coming up with their own.

Similarly, people on the metro do not look harassed, afraid of being watched. They look quite calm. Most of them are on their phones, but this is not a Russian phenomenon. IPhones abound. Occasionally, you get a woman with a large tome running to more than a thousand pages, Tolstoy perhaps, like a lunchbox on her lap. Younger people read European classics from an attractively produced series. I spot Guy de Maupassant. I get the occasional glance, more curiosity than anything, I’m amazed at the ease with which Alyosha at Sretensky Monastery identifies me as English, but I am just a passing curiosity. My son teaches me to stand aside as the doors open to let the passengers out, there is a bit of pushing and shoving. Escalator etiquette is the same as in London (stand on the right, walk on the left), so I’m not a complete country bumpkin, though I feel like one.

The metro stations are grand. Some of them were built under Stalin – Komsomolskaya is a prime example, with mosaics on the ceiling of generals mustering their troops beneath the banner of Christ or Lenin preaching in Red Square. I have fun taking photographs of my favourite mosaic with St Basil’s Cathedral because it is positioned above the escalator, so I have to keep descending and ascending on the elevator until I think I’ve got a good one. It’s quite hard taking a photograph of the ceiling when you’re travelling upwards. My son waxes lyrical about the station before Vnukovo airport, Pykhtino, where there is a model fighter jet attached to the ceiling above the escalator (again!). The line to Vnukovo airport, 8A, is much more modern.

There are two circle lines: an inner circle line, number 5, and an outer circle line, number 11. Line 5 is remarkably smooth, it feels like travelling on air, and the seats are comfortable, not too close together, divided into groups of two and three, with plugs to charge your phone. Each carriage on the metro is fitted with a screen, which gives information about the new river transport, safety videos for children who get lost (they are to stand beneath a sign on the wall, where they will be spotted by metro staff, who come to reunite them with their parents), videos about places – the Caucasus, Astrakhan – Muscovites might like to visit, a film about the zoo. There are themed carriages – one is devoted to the Bolshoi Theatre – and there is much excitement about Yuri Gagarin because it is the 65th anniversary of his first crewed journey into space aboard Vostok 1 (Vkusno i tochka are offering models of the spaceship with their kiddie menus, and I am tempted to get one). There is a great deal of pride in the country and its achievements, and I don’t think this is a bad thing.

My overriding impression is one of efficiency, of services – public transport, museums, parks – being laid on for Russian citizens to make the most of. There is a sense of order and purpose. The parks are immaculate and extensive. I visit several: Victory Park (dedicated to those killed in the two World Wars and in Nazi concentration camps, as well as to those involved in the clean-up after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and to hero cities), Zaryadye (next to the Kremlin, with its amphitheatre-like seating and carefully ordered flower beds), Novodevichyi Prudy (next to the famous convent of the same name with its illustrious cemetery), Kolomenskoye (the former royal estate, now open to the public, with its spacious walkway next to the river, perfect for jogging, and a strange bird I am unable to identify, the size of a thrush with a grey hood and round black marks over its eyes like a robber). The buildings in Kolomenskoye are closed – it is a Monday – but the foreman gives me permission to venerate the Kazan icon of the Mother and Child and asks where I am from.

One of my most enjoyable excursions is with my son and a friend to the Arbat district of the city. We pass several buskers. My favourite is a young guy in white trainers, singing a Russian love song – the buskers put out pieces of cardboard with their bank details so you can throw in a few coins on your phone – but there are two energetic violinists playing Vivaldi in an underpass and a guy with an impossibly large balalaika, so large it has to rest on a metal pin. We pass one of Stalin’s wedding-cake buildings, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, take up position next to the river – my son’s friend jokes that the West thinks the fishermen are snipers in disguise – visit the mall next to Kiyevskaya station (more western products or Russian equivalents), and then take the metro across the river (line 4 from Kiyevskaya to Smolenskaya).

Crossing the Moscow River between Kiyevskaya and Smolenskaya.

One of my favourite evenings is my son’s blind date at the operetta house. We go to see Monte Cristo. The street outside is lit with dangling lights. I think I will be bored – after all, I don’t really understand the language, the only word I can make out is “love” – but I am struck by the enthusiasm with which the singers and dancers perform and the audience responds. If I were to stay longer, I would go again – to see Anna Karenina, for example. In the interval, I order an apple juice in Bulgarian (I have decided to speak Bulgarian slowly, rather than English) and get what I want. I walk up and down the stairs, imagining I have a seat in a box or the stalls. At the end of the interval, my son turns up with the young woman in question. He is so grown up, and gallant – bringing flowers to a first date. I press her to drink something, and she orders a tea. My son flashes his debit card before I can reach for my change. I sit in the darkness, while the attendant identifies people who are using their mobile phones by squiggling with a red laser on their screens. The couple in front of me – not my son and his date – have argued, and he is now sitting a couple of seats away. She has to lean across to speak to him, but they still manage to take a selfie in front of the stage at the end of the performance. I wonder if the accompanying music – modern rather than classical – is live or recorded. There is a pit, but it doesn’t seem to house an orchestra, because one or two of the dancers jump into it, and I can’t imagine they’re having to dodge musicians as they land. I’ve lost track of who Monte Cristo is, and I can’t quite remember the story (I know it has something to do with false imprisonment and revenge), but I admire the backflips and savour the romantic melodies. When I take my leave of the young woman – my son is going to accompany her to her metro station, where she will be met by her mother – I clutch her hand. She is uncertain, and I want her to be well. The glass bits in her hair remind me of the lights outside, candles in a Christmas tree, stars that glint in a night sky. I find everything touching, perhaps because I know my time is limited.

  1. The mosaic of St Basil’s Cathedral in Komsomolskaya station.
  2. The model fighter jet above the escalator in Pykhtino station.
  3. Monument to the liquidators of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident, Victory Park.
  4. The amphitheatre-like seating in Zaryadye Park.
  5. Moscow City and Novodevichyi Prudy Park.
  6. The Kazan icon of the Mother and Child on the Kolomenskoye estate.
  7. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Borodinsky Bridge.
  8. The lights outside the operetta house.

Jonathan Dunne

Next: A Trip to Sergiyev Posad

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III. Moscow Zoo

One of the few places I do not like (I suppose another might be the Expo, known in Russian as VDNKh) is Moscow Zoo. The conditions are not good. I wonder whether zoos should be placed in cities or whether they shouldn’t be in the open countryside, so that it is we who visit the animals’ environment and not the other way around. Some of the animals – large birds like the shoebill – look miserable, and they perform repetitive actions, the panda constantly going backwards along a walkway, the polar bear reaching the end of its pen, turning around, arching its neck in reverse, and then pacing in the other direction. It doesn’t look natural. And how could it? A golden eagle is not meant to be in a cage with a net over it, however tall that cage may be.

The humans behave like apes, and the apes behave like humans – or at least our impression of what their behaviour is. They (the humans) screech and laugh hysterically, chasing each other up the ramp, while the apes sit normally, playing with a sheet, wondering what the fuss is all about. When I approach the zebras, they seem to make up their mind to go outside, but of course they should be on the savannah. I wonder if it isn’t cold in Moscow for a lot of these animals, especially the ones from Africa. The only glimmer of hope is the Baltic grey seals – there is a little interaction with humans, and they swim very gracefully – and the bearded seals, where there is a pup, and again one cannot but be impressed by the gracefulness of these large animals in water. At least they have space to move in, even if it isn’t the open sea.

I am falling into a depression, I can hardly bring myself to take any photographs, and then I notice something. What the animals want is to be seen – not gawped at, not photographed, not pointed at. They do not want to be a source of entertainment, like a television screen. They want to be acknowledged. I suddenly realize that they are looking at me – in the hope that I will see them.

As a race, we are so inclined to view the environment as two-dimensional, as being put there for our entertainment and provision, but it is so much more than that. It has its own intrinsic worth, its own meaning, one we are slow to pick up on, since we believe its sole meaning is to reflect us back to ourselves, to convey our message, to fill our stomachs, to keep us amused. We see the environment, but we do not see it. It is like a picture on the wall, a backdrop to the events of our lives. I wonder how much the verse Genesis 1:28 might have to do with this.

I cannot change the animals’ conditions, I cannot break in at night and free them, transport them back to their natural surroundings. More’s the pity. But I can at least see them. I make a connection with their gaze. I put down my phone. I sympathize with them and understand something of their plight.

All the earth wants is to be seen – not exploited, not fenced in, not traded, but seen. It is we who have to change. And when we do, what we see becomes incomparably richer.

  1. The giraffe.
  2. The lion.
  3. The snowy owl.
  4. The otter.
  5. The Baltic grey seal.
  6. The bearded seal.
  7. The lynx.
  8. The panda.
  9. The dhole.
  10. The polar bear.

Jonathan Dunne

Next: Moscow Life

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II. The Tretyakov Gallery

I am not a fan of art galleries – I find them ever so slightly soporific. But not the Tretyakov. I am enthralled. Each new hall – and there are sixty-two of them – reveals a new wonder. I go around, choosing my favourite painting in each room, but soon I have to surpass my limit of one and choose two or three. The paintings go from the eighteenth century (Catherine II’s Victory over the Turks and Tatars) to the mid-twentieth century (these are among my favourites). There are portraits (lots of them), rural scenes, battle scenes, a remarkable and slightly surreal Appearance of Christ to the People by Alexander Ivanov, where the focus is on John the Baptist and the motley crew that have gathered around him (Christ is in the background, and you do not notice him at first). What makes it even more wonderful is the presence in the next hall of the studies the painter carried out for each of the characters in the main painting. They are clearly recognizable. I am touched by Vasily Tropinin, his portrait of a lacemaker (and indeed his self-portrait with the Kremlin behind him). There are portraits of famous writers, from Pushkin to Gogol and Dostoevsky to Chekhov, and composers like Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. But my favourite portrait is the magical Girl with Peaches by Valentin Serov, the fruit and cutlery on the table, the plate on the wall, the greenery visible through the window, and the girl’s somewhat nonchalant gaze. She seems to have been captured with ruffled hair before leaping up from her chair to go out into the garden. Serov has a similarly liquid portrait of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and a scene of his happier coronation in the Assumption Cathedral, a bustle of colour and activity, movement and intensity. There is a peacefulness to the Russian countryside (the Russian soul?) – take, for example, The Rooks Have Come by Alexei Savrasov (available as a phone cover in the gift shop) or A Quiet Monastery by Isaac Levitan. There are battle scenes that reflect the futility of war (The Vanquished by Vasily Vereshchagin, with a priest censing the bodies of the dead). Ilya Repin is a master – he is famous for his painting of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, the tsar having just dealt his son a fatal blow to the head, but I prefer his portraits (his daughter sitting on a branch). I am very impressed by Nikolai Ge and his religious scenes – the Roman soldiers departing the scene of the crucifixion, almost laughing about it, while unbeknown to them, as the sun rises, an angel hastens to the ensuing resurrection. I am not such a fan of Mikhail Vrubel and his blotchy paintings – they seem to like him – but I do like the twentieth-century representatives: Evening in the Steppe by Pavel Kuznetsov, the humour of A Windy Day by Nikolay Krymov, and Constantinople. Dogs by Martiros Saryan.

Just when I think I cannot take any more, I reach halls 56-62, the end of the exhibition, with all the ancient icons, and my breath is taken away: St Nicholas and the Annunciation, twelfth-century icons from Novgorod; the early fifteenth-century Transfiguration by a painter of the circle of Theophanes the Greek; a King of Glory from my neck of the woods (the Balkans): Christ in Majesty by Dionisius; and then the crème de la crème, Andrei Rublev and his Saviour and Archangel Michael from the Deesis of Zvenigorod. I think my mouth drops open. A Russian looks at me with bemusement. My phone battery is exhausted, so I sit on the bench and contemplate the Saviour for twenty minutes, as he stares lifelike at me from out of the wood of the Trinity.

There are so many paintings to take in. I am struck by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Mental Arithmetic, the boys in S. A. Rachinsky’s free school racking their brains to get the answer right, again the intensity of their gaze, the shared effort, the wisdom and patience of old age as the teacher waits for them to work out the equation. And this is an overriding impression in Moscow: it is a city of industry, or better industriousness, people working in concert, it is not a city that is standing still.

I decide against doing anything else that day, the Tretyakov is enough, I drink an Earl Grey tea and eat a Danish pastry, and then head back to my accommodation, my mind full of images, models gazing at me from the canvas.

  1. The Appearance of Christ to the People by Alexander Ivanov.
  2. The Rooks Have Come by Alexei Savrasov.
  3. Mental Arithmetic by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky.
  4. The Vanquished by Vasily Vereshchagin.
  5. Portrait of Composer M. P. Musorgsky by Ilya Repin.
  6. Heralds of the Resurrection by Nikolai Ge.
  7. A Girl with Peaches by Valentin Serov.
  8. Evening in the Steppe by Pavel Kuznetsov.
  9. The Transfiguration by a painter of the circle of Theophanes the Greek (early 15th century).
  10. Christ in Majesty by Dionisius (1500).
  11. The Saviour by Andrei Rublev (c. 1400).

Jonathan Dunne

Next: Moscow Zoo

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Moscow: A Visitor’s Impressions

I. Red Square

I suppose the place a Westerner visiting Moscow for the first time wants to see most is Red Square. This is probably the only image of Moscow I retained from my childhood. The military parade. Russia as a military threat. Victory Day. But when we left the Revolution Square metro station, my son took me past the statue of Karl Marx, somewhat blinded by the sun, to visit the Bolshoi Theatre. “Bolshoi”, such a resonant term for lovers of ballet, simply means “Big”. Next to it, unsurprisingly, is another theatre called “Small” and an operetta house we will go to a few days later (my son has a blind date, and I am there to chaperone him; actually he mistakenly bought an extra ticket). When I do finally make it into Red Square via the Resurrection Gate next to the History Museum, I find myself in a large, cobbled space with the Kremlin walls to my right, the emblematic St Basil’s Cathedral ahead of me, and a fancy mall on my left. Nestled beneath the Kremlin walls is Lenin’s mausoleum. One cannot help but be struck by the juxtaposition of Christianity and socialism, an impression that is reinforced later by a visit to Zaryadye Park, where on a walkway suspended above the Moscow River one can view the Kremlin (with the Archangel Cathedral clearly visible) and further down the north bank the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. As if to make the visitor feel even dizzier, each tower of the Kremlin walls is topped by a red star. I learn my first history lesson: Russians commemorate all aspects of their past, they do not try to do away with them, as has happened in Bulgaria, for example, where socialist monuments are dismantled and Dimitrov’s mausoleum was (with some difficulty) razed to the ground.

The walls are not so red, either. They are more russet. I gravitate towards St Basil’s Cathedral, known to the Russians as Pokrovsky Cathedral, a reference to the Virgin Mary’s veil (pokrov) and the protection Ivan the Terrible believed he had received in his successful military campaign against the Kazan Khanate in the sixteenth century, which was the reason for him to erect this church. The Basil in question is not the fourth-century theologian, but a contemporary holy fool who was later buried in the church. The familiar domes, looking like turbans, provide a splash of colour: blue and white, green and white, green and gold, red and green, gold. I pose in front of the church and the monument to Minin and Pozharsky, a butcher and a noble who organized resistance to the Polish invaders another fifty years later (in 1612). This would bring to an end the Time of Troubles and lead to the rise of the Romanov dynasty, which would rule over Russia for the next three hundred years, until the bloody revolution of 1917 and the rise of the Bolsheviks under Lenin.

It is easy to lose one’s sense of direction because the Kremlin is not four-sided, but more of a triangle, so you have the south side facing the river, Red Square to the north-east, and Alexander Garden to the north-west. Inside the Kremlin are four ancient churches: the Assumption, Archangel, and Annunciation Cathedrals, and a smaller Church of Laying Our Lady’s Holy Robe. Here also is the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, a large bell sitting at its feet, a chunk missing – it is difficult to ascend to heaven when you are so heavy – and the Senate. The Kremlin, therefore, far from being military in character, is an enclosure that houses churches built (two by Italian architects) during the Grand Duchy of Moscow. My favourite is the Assumption Cathedral with its towering iconostasis (the icons that hide the altar from view, I notice how in some of the grander Russian churches the iconostasis consists of five levels and reaches all the way to the ceiling, the icons of the second level being particularly large, some of which I will see out of context in the Tretyakov Gallery) and frescoes adorning the columns, ceiling, and walls; the Archangel Cathedral, with its icon of St Michael, prince of the heavenly host, was used by royals to pray for military success, and many of them are buried here, while the Annunciation Cathedral was used as a private chapel.

In the Annunciation Cathedral, a Russian woman is enthusiastically explaining the icons to a group of Asian tourists. The tourists answer her questions with comparable enthusiasm, like excited schoolchildren. The Russian woman is indulgent with them and greets their correct answers with mild expressions of joy. I am waiting to take a photograph of the iconostasis, but the male tourist’s head obstructs my view of the holy doors at the centre of the iconostasis. As they move to the left, a woman comes in and stands in front of the icon of Christ. She leaves, but the Asian group automatically shuffles to the right, again making it impossible for me to gain a clear view. They then exit the church, and I think my moment has come, but just as I am about to press the shutter, they come back in – either they have forgotten something, or a point has to be made more forcefully. I rue having entered the church at the same time as them, if only I had been five or ten minutes later or earlier, but in the end they leave and I get my shot. The Russian woman flashes me a look; she is eyeing me as a prospective student.

That morning, we visit Lenin’s Mausoleum. The queue is not long, and the constant drizzle helps to keep it down. We are not required to buy a ticket, entrance is free (entrance to the Kremlin is 11 euros; the History Museum and St Basil’s Cathedral both cost 20 euros, which I find a bit steep). We pass through security and along the wall, where the ashes of prominent socialists are interred, including the Scottish Arthur MacManus and the American Bill Haywood, before going down some steps and entering the mausoleum proper. A guard indicates that I should put my phone away and not take photographs. We descend some more steps, turn a corner, and there is Lenin in his casket, brightly lit in the surrounding darkness and surprisingly intact after a hundred years. Here is the architect of the 1917 Revolution, the one who promoted and was later pushed aside by Stalin. Stalin is buried outside, along with other leaders, while other prominent socialist-era politicians, such as Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, are buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in the south-west of the city. It is difficult to avoid a comparison between Lenin’s embalmed body and the relics of a saint in an Orthodox church, and the impact on Russians must have been similar. There is an aura about him. We pause for a moment before being encouraged by a disembodied voice somewhere in the shadows to move on. As we leave the area, the Spasskaya Tower strikes twelve and follows this up with a jaunty rendition of the Russian anthem. I am not sure what century I am in or what the dominant ideology is meant to be.

  1. Red Square (taken from the third floor of the History Museum).
  2. St Basil’s Cathedral with the monument to Minin and Pozharsky.
  3. The Kremlin walls and the domes inside the courtyard (Annunciation, Archangel, Bell Tower).
  4. The five-tiered iconostasis inside the Assumption Cathedral.
  5. The entrance to Lenin’s mausoleum.
  6. The view along the Moscow River from the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge.

Jonathan Dunne

Next: The Tretyakov Gallery

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Thessaloniki in Flowers

The most common colour of flowers in and around the city of Thessaloniki in Greece is pink-purple, followed by white. Many are native to the Mediterranean basin or, more broadly, to Eurasia, but several are from America (amaryllis, pinklady, pink-sorrel, silverleaf nightshade), there is one from Australia (the wonderfully named crimson bottlebrush, the last of the photos), and perhaps surprisingly there is a whole group from South Africa (Cape Marguerite, sour fig, treasure flower). Flowers are just as widely travelled as we are!

Poppy
Jasmine
Oleander
Lavender
Silver ragwort
White Tower
Vlatadon Monastery
Rose
Mallow
Japanese cheesewood
Cape Marguerite
Sour fig
Rose
Pinklady
Sowthistle
Silverleaf nightshade
Wild mustard
Pink-sorrel
Amaryllis
Lily
Bougainvillea
Begonia
Rose
Rose
Pomegranate
Treasure flower
Rotunda
Hawksbeard
Bellflower
Monkshood
Orlias Stream
Wild basil
Gipsy rose
Canary clover and common brimstone
Bloody crane’s-bill
Geranium
Flowering inch plant
Aloe vera
Purple clover
Crimson bottlebrush
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The Spanish Riveter

Hats off to the editors of The Spanish Riveter, a magazine freely available online and published by the European Literature Network, West Camel and Katie Whittemore, for producing a very thorough and inclusive, 294-page issue packed full of interesting writing and features. I can’t think of a better way of dipping into contemporary writing from Spain in all its manifestations: Basque, Castilian, Catalan, Galician…

There are sections not only on the four languages I have just mentioned – I was privileged to be asked to write the introduction to Galician literature on pages 200-204 – but also on publishing, grants, poetry, children’s literature, women’s writing (let us not forget that the last Spanish National Book Award for Fiction was won by a Galician woman writer, Marilar Aleixandre, who wasn’t even born in Galicia and adopted the language later on) and the Latam Boom.

All the people I have worked with over the last thirty years seem to have been included, and this is a testament to the editors’ hard work and open approach.

I fancy that some Galician editors would not agree with Katie Whittemore’s statement that “there is the sense that Spain’s other languages, while perhaps still on the back foot, so to speak, are experiencing growth in the book sector, with more institutional support, as well as a greater appetite from readers both within and without the Spanish territory” (page 8). Francisco Castro, director of the most traditional Galician publishing house, Editorial Galaxia, stated only the other day in the Faro de Vigo newspaper that “the Galician market is getting smaller and smaller, every year it is getting more and more difficult to reach income levels.” He goes on to talk about the great tragedy being experienced in Galicia, “which is the loss of its language,” and affirms that “a market that has to see a language in decline is destined for extinction.”

I would say that literary translators are “destined for extinction” and not much has been achieved since the heady days of the 1990s, when there was much talk of literary translation being a profession. Literary translators are still required to take significant personal risks, they do not receive a salary, sick leave or a pension, very little attention is paid to their work, and the juggernaut that is the English-language book market is hurtling along at such a pace it simply crushes the tossed-aside can of books in translation, offering little space in mainstream media to add to the difficulty of rising printing and distribution costs. We were never much inclined to listen to the other’s voice, which is a shame, really, since this would not only enrich our lives, but also lead to better international relations. Institutions, and the general public, are inclined to toss a coin in the cap of literary translation (without really understanding what it is), not much more.

As a publisher, I would strongly disagree with Alice Banks’ appraisal of grants on pages 62-63. She mentions one source, Acción Cultural Española, whose grants “cover the cost of translation.” This is typical of how it looks on the outside and how it really works in practice. In 2020 I applied for a grant for the Oxford professor John Rutherford to translate a Galician classic, Memoirs of a Village Boy by Xosé Neira Vilas. I asked for 2960 euros and was offered 1332 euros (that is, nine euros per page). That is a long way off the UK Translators’ Association’s recommended *minimum* rate of £100/1000 words (approximately 22 euros/page). Ainhoa Sánchez, the person responsible for literature, confirmed by email that “our grants are a support and are not meant to cover the overall cost, since we do not have the necessary budget.” This is an excuse I have heard many times, but it is not true – you simply support fewer projects with the same budget. I declined the grant, and we published the book on our own. There is a review by Paul Burke on pages 208-209 of the magazine.

But let us celebrate the diversity that this excellently produced magazine has brought to the fore and thank that ever hopeful cohort of translators, editors and publishers who continue to work and strive for translation. There is much to admire here.

Gallery
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Orthodox Christmas in Bulgaria

These photos were taken in the Russian Church of St Nicholas and the Bulgarian Church of St Sophia, both in central Sofia, with the permission of their respective priests.

  • Icon of Christ (St Nicholas)
  • Holy Trinity (St Nicholas, crypt)
  • Mother and Child (St Nicholas, crypt ceiling)
  • Iconostasis (St Nicholas)
  • Angels in the altar (St Nicholas)
  • Reading the Six Psalms during the All-night Vigil (St Nicholas)
  • St Sophia with Alexander Nevsky Cathedral
  • St Sophia, the oldest church in Sofia, with the Monument to the Unknown Soldier
  • Nave (St Sophia)
  • Liturgy of the Catechumens (St Sophia)
  • Liturgy of the Faithful (St Sophia)
  • Holy Communion (St Sophia)
  • Iliyana and the Christmas tree (St Sophia)
  • Antidoron (St Sophia)
  • Wine for after Communion (St Sophia)
  • Nave from the choir loft (St Sophia)
  • Mosaic icon of Christ (St Sophia)
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Izgrev Revisited

Today I revisited Izgrev, meaning ‘Sunrise’ in Bulgarian, the old artists’ and writers’ quarter of Sofia, where I lived when I first arrived in Bulgaria seventeen years ago. It’s obvious my wife, a poet, is the one who found me the flat. I used to enjoy living in this quarter, it was quiet, relatively small, there were one or two embassies, a disused railway track and, on the other side of the track, a very cold swimming pool. You could even catch a bus to go to Vitosha, the mountain that overlooks Sofia from the south (in those days I didn’t drive, that would come later). I lived in a flat on the eighth floor of a high-rise, perhaps twenty floors in all, six apartments per floor. I remember people being friendly and cultured. There was a family whose daughter was a professional pianist and she used to practise at dizzying pace in the afternoons. There was a lovely old couple that lived upstairs, but unfortunately their son (perhaps to forge an identity of his own) used to be up and about at night, and his bedroom was on top of mine. This is one of the reasons I left the apartment after little more than a year. The other was a drunk who lived downstairs and who would get inebriated on vodka on a Friday night, come home, put his music on loud and throw up in the toilet (I was still able to make this out over the loud music). It wasn’t a bed of roses, but I was experiencing my first taste of Eastern Europe, a culture shock for someone who had lived in England and Spain before that, but one that has served me well. The flat was comfortable and cosy, and the icing on the cake was a house martins’ nest just outside my bedroom window. I used to watch the adults flying at exactly the height of my apartment over breakfast. Unadulterated joy. I also did a lot of work there, and translated my first and only Catalan novel, In the Last Blue by Carme Riera, winner of the Spanish National Book Award, about the persecution of Jews on the island of Mallorca in the seventeenth century.

I grew up in a village in Surrey and one of my first memories is visiting the local woods. To my good fortune, it turns out Izgrev has a wood and I used to immerse myself in this wood, going for walks every day, leaving behind the slightly grey high-rise blocks (and the car alarms) and seemingly entering another world. The forest took me in. I think it understood I had recently left my familiar surroundings, so it took me under its wing, so to speak. It accepted me. I spent many hours circumambulating the forest, walking around its furthest extent, then diving into the interior, criss-crossing the wood, until I reached the very centre, where there stood a tall sequoia tree. Some days were better than others, but I grew to love this wood, and I think this wood loved me. There was one particular gentleman, a fellow walker, who used to be there as much as me. He would walk around with his head in the air, looking upwards, his gaze distracted, as if he had entered another dimension. I’m not even sure if he noticed me. Or perhaps it was just the thick glasses that gave him this otherworldly look, as if he had climbed further up the ladder of divine ascent. I wondered what he could see, what it was I wasn’t seeing. The world can seem so two-dimensional from transport (a car or a train), even three-dimensional when we are in it, but it is difficult to reach further in, to enter the code, to strain our eyes. We must wait for the vision to come to us.

The sequoia tree at the heart of Izgrev Forest.

I took solace in this forest. I remember a Romanian-Nigerian couple coming to stay for a night, and I religiously took them on my daily outing, a swift walk around the forest’s outer border. We couldn’t walk next to each other, the path wasn’t wide enough, and it was getting dark, so we walked in single file, with me leading the way. Goodness knows what they made of this quasi-nocturnal outing, but they never said anything and smiled all the way.

Today I went back to the forest, the path that leads away from the high-rise buildings, up into the woods. A short ascent, and then you are on the level. I started by following the main path all around the forest, busy roads limiting its extent on every side where there are not buildings. Then I cut in along a path I knew in order to get back where I had started. It seemed to take much less time than I had anticipated. Perhaps twenty minutes in all. And I had been expecting a single circuit of the forest to be enough. I was a little disappointed. Had the forest become smaller in my absence? No, it seemed the same. Was it because it was winter, and I could see through the trees, which therefore gave the impression the forest had shrunk? Or is it that, in order to package our memories, we make the places we have been to smaller? They expand when we are there, when we live in a place on a daily basis, but when we leave, they contract in order not to occupy too much memory on the hard disk of our minds. It felt like revisiting an old girlfriend. You wondered what all the fuss had been about. The world – what am I saying, the universe – you had shared now seemed small and provincial. Your life lay elsewhere. In the intervening period, I had got married, had a child, learned to drive, been through a wealth of experiences. And that little pocket I had explored so much now seemed just that – a little pocket.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is all flat. When we visit a place, we blow it up, like a balloon, and it expands in order to contain our life, our loves and experiences, and when we leave, it deflates again, like a balloon after a party.

I didn’t go there to revisit my past. I went because it’s New Year’s Day and I wanted to give Simi, our dog, a run-around. We were a bit late to go all the way to the mountain, Vitosha, so I took him there instead. He was happy, charging ahead, choosing a path when there was a fork in the expectation that I would go the same way and then charging back when I chose another (which I invariably did), his nose close to the ground. I wondered what it seemed like to him. After all, he’s only about half a foot tall (a foot, if I include his tail). The trees must seem enormous. They must multiply him about sixty times. Did he realize when I was retracing my steps, taking a path for the second time or in the opposite direction? Or was it all new to him, virgin territory to explore? (Does virgin territory even exist for dogs, can’t they always smell who’s been there before?)

Izgrev Forest.

We reached the end of our walk, Simi didn’t seem too unhappy to leave. He’s very accommodating. We passed the Korean restaurant on the ground floor of a house (so that was still working – why hadn’t I ever gone there to eat?), went past my old block with its bench out the front, seemingly inviting neighbourly conversation, past the supermarket where I did my first shopping (did Bulgarians even eat the same food as we did?), and back to the car. We hopped in, I did a three-point turn and drove back the way we had come, past the Russian Embassy compound and the garden dedicated to Peter Deunov. I left behind this remnant of my past and returned to the world I am in.

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com