In the morning we had a great stroke of luck in meeting the hotel manager, Kseniya, who let us stay in the same room tonight (I hope she didn’t throw anyone out) for only 5,400 Rub rather than 6,000, and another 6 nights in a different room for 6,000 (including a 20% discount). We had a lazy morning and then went to the nearby cemetery where we went last year to see the graves of famous composers and writers (Tchaikovsky, Mussorgskii, Borodin, Glinka, Dostoyevskii and Rimsky-Korsakov). We also went round the adjacent cemetery which holds the graves of 18-19th century lesser known citizens of St Petersburg. We went into the small church serving the cemetery and were collared by a sweet little old nun who insisted on giving us each a beautiful book on the life of St Nikolai Chudotvorets, the patron saint of the church. I didn’t want to lug two book around so I tried to give one to a friendly man who helped us find our way out of the cemetery (we naturally got lost among the gravestones) but he laughed and told us that he was the typesetter of the book and was sick of it. On the way back to the hotel we tried to give it to a shopkeeper who politely refused because he was a Moslem. We finally managed to give it to the hotel receptionist who seemed genuinely pleased. In the evening we went to a small Vietnamese restaurant and had delicious meals of prawn soup, little pies and noodle soup.
Advert for the cemetery
Cemetery buildings
Grave of a tiny child who died during the siege and (presumably) her grandmother.
Inside the church of the smaller cemetery
Outside of the church
Dostoyevskii’s grave
Grave of Aleksandr Glazounov (I didn’t take it last year).
Grave of Rimsky-Korsakov
Grave of Tchaikovskii
Grave of Ponomariyev’s children aged 15 and 1 who died in the cholera epidemic of 1834-1835.