But back all the way to Russia, and Vladimir. We had a weekend to fill whilst we waited for our Kazakh visas, and we were keen to get out of expensive busy Moscow. Our 3 hour bus ride (according to Lonely Planet - when will we learn not to believe them?) to Vladimir turned into 5 hours as heavy traffic & numerous car accidents slowed us considerably. You'd think they only designed roads for the elite few who had cars to drive on them, not having everybody wanting to use them. Also there was a bit of rain on the Friday after many days of gorgeous sunshine, so the road may not have been perfect for insane Russian driving. I'm sure that was the excuse for the half-dozen fresh accidents we passed, as well as the few slightly older ones we saw... We were glad we weren't driving the Clio at any rate.
Vladimir is another Russian city that can lay claim to being the first Russian capital. It was founded by Vladimir, but it was a different Vladimir nearly a century odd later who made it a city to be reckoned with. He managed to move the centre of the Russian Orthodox Church from Kiev up to his new stronghold, and it became the biggest Russian city for a century or so before the Mongols came through and destroyed most of Russia. There's still some impressive cathedrals though, including in our opinion the best church in all of Christendom.
On with the photos:
Joanna happy to be out of Moscow (near the fantastic church):
Here's the brilliant church, or Assumption Cathedral, as it is also known. It has a real corpse in it, and you can see the hand! It was some patriarch from the 13th century, but no guide books or internet resources seem to mention the actual dead body on show, and we've now forgotten his name.
The long distance artistic shot:
The church is astounding inside with all the sarcophagii and altars, paintings etc on show. It served as the model for the Assumption Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin (now the centre of Russian Orthodoxy), but is way cooler. It seemed to have lots of Russian Orthodox pilgrims turning up, who didn't seem bothered by the towns other sites.
We were though. Next door is St Dimitri's. It is the epitome of Russian White Stone work from the 12th & 13th century:
It is amazing up close:
All around Russia - and indeed in Serbia & Romania, one name kept popping up. Alexander Nevsky was the great Russian Hero (as cannonised by Peter the Great). He has a lot of cathedrals named after him, and was buried in the aforementioned cool Assumption Cathedral (his casket is still there), before Moscow got strong and moved him there to assert their dominance. Ivan the Terrible brought all the religious / national treasures he could to Moscow. Ben's just read the wikipedia article on him - what a dude.
Anyway, here he is with Joanna's hero (*bleurck*):
And here's another sculpture, this time of Vladimir who made the town great, behind the Assumption Cathedral:
Here's the Golden Gate, which was the entrance to the medieval city, and is now a roundabout which it is necessary for all local bridal parties to drive around several times whilst hooting their horns. We had our picture of 2 brides in St Petersburg, but if we'd had a wide-angle lens we might have got 7 on a mound behind St Dimitri's. Seeing other brides obviously isn't something that they're worried about here.
We had fun at the local history museum too, despite it being all in Russian. But Joanna's very good at making up stories.
It was a weekend of achievement too, for Ben managed perhaps his simplest leg of the drinking challenge:
It may look like a tumbler of water, but that's vodka, russian style.
All managed rather gracefully.
Monday morning we were on the train back to Moscow, we hoped to pick up our Kazakh visas and head to Kazakhstan in the evening. We needed to in fact, as the train trip was 3 days and we had 3 days left on our Russian visas...
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