travelswithalice

August 27, 2018

Nizhniy Novgorod

I lit candles in the church of St Michael the Archangel inside Nizhniy Novgorod’s beautiful Kremlin.

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During the Soviet era, Stalin changed the city’s name to Gorky to entice the Pro-Communist novelist and political activist Maxim Gorky who was born there to come back from exile in Italy to permanently return to Russia.

This house was Gorky’s childhood home where he lived with his grandmother until he ran away at age 12. It’s now a museum.

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Obisov Chambers is a 17th century white-stone house, said to be the oldest house in Nizhniy Novgorod and one of very few such “white-stone” buildings existing in all of Russia. It was built by Afanasy Olisova, a member of the class of wealthy merchants called “guests” whom Tsar Peter the Great forcibly relocated to St Petersburg to boost trade in his newly created city.

In front of this house, Olisova also built a beautiful church. It’s one of a few churches not destroyed by the Soviets because they had been repurposed as administrative buildings or as warehouses. This one was used as a chemical laboratory.

It is said that this ugly block of flats was built as camouflage to hide the church from prying eyes. To this day, the church is practically obliterated from the landscape as viewed from the Volga River, the only way it could’ve been seen at the time because the Soviets had sealed off Nizhniy Novgorod as a “closed city.”

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There’s a restaurant in town called Expedition. It really does take you on an expedition - to Siberia.

You get to go in a chopper...

...stay in a chum swaddled in reindeer hides...

...dine on exotic game like reindeer liver paté, deer heart rolls, boiled reindeer tongue served with crisp rye bread and smoked cowberries...

...and sip a nastoyka (tincture), a spice and herb infusion with an alcohol content of anywhere from 25% to 60%.

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Irina, our very charming, very knowledgeable guide tells me the grand Chikalov Staircase that links the upper and lower embankments of the Volga River has 642 steps.

“I know because I counted them myself,” she says.

Wikipedia tells me there are 560 on both sides or 442 from bottom to top.

There are many interesting stories about this historic city; there are many secrets and myths too. Some stories can be fact-checked; others can’t. I guess I can do what Irina did: go up those steps and count them myself.

Below the staircase is the very point where the Volga and the Oka rivers converge. We take a riverboat cruise to watch the sunset and the moonrise.

On board the boat, a nice gentleman from Nizhniy and his son who was born in Kamchatka (“It’s near Japan,” the father offers) and now lives in Moscow want to know why Stuart and I would come on holiday all this way from Manila. The older man offers Stuart a drink from a bottle of cognac he’d brought along with him, tucked away nicely in his shoulder bag. To me he offers a Twix chocolate bar.

Who says Russians are unfriendly?

As we glide past the monumental staircase, he comes up to me, taps me on my arm, and says in his laboured English, “Do you know...that staircase was built by Germans?”

Now, that’s a story I’d like to pursue! But his grandson is tugging at his sleeve and he reluctantly moves away.

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At the point where two rivers meet, the sun sets between the old and the new: the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral founded in 1868 and the World Cup Stadium built in 2018.