I wonder my lovelies, did you know that a kremlin is a major fortified citadel or castle found in historic Russian cities? I will confess to you that I did not know that. I thought referring to the Kremlin was like referring to Parliament House. It would be fair to say the the Moscow Kremlin is the most famous but there are kremlins in many Russian cities, another thing for you to google if you're interested.
This is one of the gates in the old wall. The walkway is where the bridge over the moat would have been in the days when safety and defence were the purpose of castles.
Coming through the gate, the buildings of the castle can be seen, like the Kremlin commander's house which is quite plain and not used as a residence anymore. Once upon a time this was an area that housed aristocracy, high ranking officials etc.
It has quite a spacious feeling with lots of pretty gardens and parks.
This building is the one with which I am most familiar and it was from here that Khrushchev and Kennedy had those important conversations. Built in the 60s, it's not in keeping with the ancient surroundings so the architects, who were constrained in their by their brief to make it modern, added as much glass as possible (you can't really see it from this angle) to reflect the surrounding more traditional buildings. Architects are clever people.
Everywhere you go in Moscow there's statues to commemorate historical events and famous Russians. Houses are marked with plaques and our amazing guide, Kate, knew them all. How she kept all that knowledge in her head I'll never know. In the Kremlin there is a row of Russian cannons intact lording it over the barrels of cannons commandeered from Napoleon.
This is not one of them, because look at the size of it! Kate said if it was used in war it would have killed everyone on both sides, but that striations inside the barrel indicate it has been fired at least once. The circumstances of that firing are not known (did it kill the poor guys who did the test fire?)
There's a huge bell too *insert interesting historical facts here* (google is your friend), looks impressive until you walk around the corner and see the 'slight' flaw.
that's MGM doing his woopsy face
The Russian President has his offices here so security is intense. Guards keep you on set paths and blow whistles if you get off course. There's a military display, again like you see in a lot of catles like this, I'm not sure if it's a changing of the guard thing but there's something so impressive about seeing military marches
There's lots of churches in the precinct, all of them breathtaking.
and a museum that houses precious jewels, Faberge eggs, national dress, embroidery and the armoury, about 20kms of it if you want to see it all, which we declined to do. Instead we went to a four course lunch and Cafe Pushkin, opened in 1999 to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of the famous poet Alexander Pushkin. It looks much older and is very swanky.
No need for dinner tonight but we did walk past Maccas on the way back to the hotel, distinguishable by the golden arches not by the name ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment