Goritsy; Yaroslavl

So the photos: The one of me and Dick is in the park in Yaroslavl where a merchant had come up with his display that involved this reflective cube. The gold domed church is in Yaroslavl with a monument to WWII casualties. The produce display is in a market in Yaroslavl. The other photo is the monastery at Goritsy.

Sept 26
Visited the town of Goritsy, a tiny settlement near a very famous monastery, the Kirillo-Beloserky Monastery, originally founded in 1397 by Kirill (Cyril), a monk who was later canonized. Kyrill is also responsible for the Cyrillic alphabet, bless his heart. Nearby is a remains of a convent. Apparently, one of the main functions of nunneries was to get rid of bothersome women including wives that you were tired of. Divorce was not a possibility so the options were poisoning or banishment to the convent. Ivan the Terrible banished the mother of a rival to the nunnery to prevent her interfering in his rule. He also had 7 wives, many who died under mysterious circumstances. At least one went to the convent. The monastery is huge and contains many valuable iconographic art works, vestments and documents dating back as far as the 14th century. Hated our guide who droned on and on. The good news was that it didn’t rain but was cold and windy so once again we had on all the clothing we brought .
We had a lecture on Russian history this morning, speaking of going on and on. Interesting but FAR tooooo loooong. Also had a talk on Russian tea drinking with demonstration of how a samovar works and then a tasting of pirogis (both fruit and meat pirogis) and tea.


Sept 27
Today we had another Russian history lesson covering the 20th century to present. Not as long, interesting. It’s good NOT to have lived in Russia for much of the last 1300 years. We also had another Russian lesson and learned some Russian songs. We are easily entertained while on the ship. Even Dick sang!
The afternoon was spent in the city of Yaroslavl, the town where there was the recent crash of the plane with all the ice hockey players. Yaroslavl is a large city of something like 600,000 that was the capital of Russia for a brief period in ancient times. We had a city tour including another monastery and a couple more churches……all of which have blended together in my mind and when I look at the photographs I will have no idea which is which. We had some free time and walked through a large flea market and also a grocery that may have been some sort of coop. There were multiple places for buying meats, or fish, or produce. The produce was arranged beautifully as were dried fruits and spices. A small park had cute flower displays with a variety of accompanying objects set up by local merchants. Kinda fun to walk through.