Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Tallinn and Riga - July 2005

Believe it or not, Athens is considered a hardship post in the US State Department, mainly because of past terrorist organizations that targeted Americans working at the Embassy.  That may or may not have ended but we are still classified as a hardship post so many people are surprised when I say that we get two Rest and Recreation (R&R) trips in our three year tour of Athens.  Our R&R point is London, England and, theoretically, we could have been in London when the Underground bombs went off.  But State Department allows us to go to locations other than our R&R point.  As it was, we planned our first R&R trip to visit a part of Europe we haven’t been to and a part where we had been to but where I have family tree connections.



Thirty years ago when we lived in Teheran, Iran, Rita and I took a tour in November, 1975 to Moscow with an overnight train to St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad.  Since that time I have found more information on my great-great-grandfather who migrated to St. Petersburg, Russia in 1830.  In recent years I have obtained records of streets he lived on in St. Petersburg so I had a reason to return and walk those streets.



We left Athens on Saturday, July 2 and flew to Helsinki, Finland, via Frankfurt, arriving in mid-afternoon.  Through the Internet we had arranged for a bus tour from Helsinki to St. Petersburg to Tallinn with Scan Tours of California.  Scan Tours in turn outsourced to Via Hansa, a Latvia-based company.  It gets complicated but so did the arrangements of the tour and some of the tour itself.  We checked into the nice SAS Radisson hotel and had spare time before meeting the tour group so we walked to the city center.



It was a warm day in Helsinki and we enjoyed our walk along the wide esplanade, streets named Pohjoisesplanadi and Etelaesplanadi, with a grassy park full of sun worshipers in the middle.  Once more we were fortunate with warm, sunny weather the entire trip.  Also, we were in the far north and this time of the year the sun rose about 4:45 am and set about 11:20 pm.  In Russia this time of the year is known as the White Nights.  We strolled around Helsinki visiting the Market Square at the harbor, Senate Square with the Lutheran Cathedral, and Uspenski Orthodox Cathedral.  We had a good cappuccino at an old café called Engel’s then walked back to our hotel to meet the tour. 



In the evening we met our tour leader in the bar along with the rest of our group.  They consisted of four elderly (older than us!) Italian women who only spoke Italian, a Belgian couple, Sabine and Karel, and an Australian couple, Ross and Helen.  Our main guide, who would stay with us throughout the trip, was a young man named Andres from Estonia.  As the Estonian language is similar to Finnish he could speak that plus Russian, having grown up under Russian rule.  We had a young lady named Dea who spoke Italian and was along with us just to the Russian border since she hadn’t had time to get a visa for Russia.  We had a nice meal together in the hotel restaurant, Viola, and retired to bed a bit early since we had started our morning at 3:00 am.



After breakfast Sunday morning we had a city tour with yet another tour guide, a local girl named Laura, who spoke English and Italian.  The tour started in a park with a monument to the Finnish composer Sibelius and continued on to an open-air museum on Seurasaari Island.  We walked the green and wooded island, which was populated with relocated buildings – houses, barns, mills, etc. – from all over Finland and Lapland.  Next we drove past several Finnish buildings of note such as their Olympic Stadium, Opera House, Finlandia Hall, National Museum, Parliament, and Senate Square.  As always, these tour guides throw multitudes of facts and figures at you but I mainly remember Laura saying that Finland manufactures 60% of the world’s ice breakers.  You don’t hear that every day.



In the afternoon we all took a ferry to the Suomenlinna maritime fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, built in the 1700s when the Swedes ruled the country.  It is a very large fort built over six connecting islands in Helsinki’s harbor.  There were thick walls and cannons all about, a delight for children to climb on and the perfect weather for doing so.  It seemed half of Helsinki was at the fortress, with white-skinned sunbathers lying about getting pinker by the minute and the smell of sun block in the air.



We were all on our own in the evening so Rita and I visited some stores and had a nice dinner at a Finnish-style restaurant called Aino.  Rita had a traditional Finnish meal of stuffed cabbage while I had local fish.  It was a good meal and pleasant to dine outside under an umbrella.  Rita said she couldn’t remember the last time she could get sunburned at 8:00 pm.  Helsinki reminded us of Stockholm in that it’s on the Baltic Sea, has numerous surrounding islands, and has many green parks with clear lakes and wooded areas.  Since Sweden once ruled this land and there is a sizeable Swedish community, the street signs are in both Finnish and Swedish.



The next morning our Russian bus driver and bus picked us up and headed towards the border through forests of beech, birch and pine with occasional clearings for farms.  At times the ground was so rocky it was hard to believe the trees could grow.  Farms would be growing rye or yellow rapeseed which stood out against the green woods.  At the Russian border we expected a long wait but were pleasantly surprised that the process only took us an hour total.  One sight caught my eye and has yet to be explained.  At the border there were seven or eight luxury cars or SUVs from the US that a group traveling together was taking into Russia.  Some of the cars had California plates and some had no plates at all.  Were these stolen cars or were they only slightly used cars that rich Russians wanted to buy?



Immediately across the border the Russian highway deteriorated into a rough, bumpy two lane road whereas in Finland it was a nice, smooth, four lane highway.  Almost all the houses and buildings in Russia looked tacky and run down.  In a short time we came to the town of Vybourg which was once a Finnish town but ceded to the Russians to end hostilities between the two countries during WW II.  In Vybourg we picked up two more guides, one who spoke only Russian and one, Mila, who spoke English and Italian and would travel on to St. Petersburg with us later.  In my opinion we could have just stopped in Vybourg for lunch, viewed Vybourg castle from a distance and gone on to St. Petersburg.  But no, we had to have a tour of this godforsaken dump of a town.  To top it off, we had to have the local city tour guide who spoke to Mila in Russian, then Mila spoke to our group first in Italian and then English.  It took forever and there wasn’t anything of interest to see.  Vybourg was probably a very pretty town before the Russians took it over and wrecked it.  But I did have a good lunch of mushroom and cheese stuffed blinis, a sort of Russian crepe. 



We continued on to St. Petersburg arriving at our Moscow Hotel about 9:30 pm.  The Moscow Hotel was a Soviet-built hotel back when they believed that bigger meant better.  It has nearly a thousand rooms which have been upgraded since the Soviet era but still are not air conditioned.  Did I mention that we were in a heat wave?  We did have a fan but the rotating mechanism wasn’t working so we toughed it out. 



Russia has changed a great deal since we last visited 30 years ago.  For one thing, people have things to buy now.  Some people have money to buy with.  Russia is certainly unevenly divided with a small, very wealthy upper class (oligarchs) and growing lower class that probably never learned a work ethic under communism.  I don’t think there is much of a middle class as yet.  St. Petersburg is a very big city with 5 to 6 million population.  We read that there are some 250 former palaces scattered around St. Petersburg and, while the center of town was spared by the German siege during WW II, many of the palaces, churches and stately buildings were treated harshly under communism and deteriorated badly.  Today many are being restored.  The suburbs we drove through have some nice modern apartment buildings and shopping malls.  We saw Coca Cola bottling plants, Toyota plants, Ikea, McDonalds, KFCs, and Pizza Huts.



Tuesday morning started out with a so-so breakfast buffet at the hotel and then a city tour lead by Mila.  We started with a drive down St. Petersburg’s main street, Nevsky Prospect, past many old churches, statues, and former palaces.  We drove to the Admiralty and across Dvortsovy most (bridge) to Vasilevsky Island where we stopped.  We walked by the Rostral Columns which were formerly used as lighthouses.  Nearby was a man with three baby bear cubs chained to his car.  On Vasilevsky Island we drove past Pushkin’s house, the State University (in 18^th century building), then recrossed the Neva River to the statue of Peter the Great.  In the area was the Admiralty, the old riding school, St. Isaacs Cathedral, Marinsky Palace and statue of Czar Nicholas I who ruled when Ernst Franke lived in St. Petersburg. 



We continued our city tour to the palace of Czar Paul I, Russian Museum (former palace), park with statue of Pushkin, Church of the Spilt Blood, and then across the Neva River to the Peter and Paul Fortress where Peter the Great started the city in 1703.  We went into the Peter and Paul Orthodox church where almost all the former czars are buried.  A couple of others have been scattered elsewhere but don’t ask me who or where.  Since we visited here in 1975 the bodies of the last czar, Nicholas II, his wife and some of the children (Anastasia for one) have been relocated here.  He and his entire family were executed by the Soviets in Yekaterinburg. 



The afternoon program was the Hermitage Museum or Catherine the Great’s Winter Palace.  The Hermitage really ranks up there as one of the top museums along with the Louvre.  We quickly saw paintings by di Vinci, Rembrandt, Titian, Tintorello, Rubens, Monet, Picasso, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse and many others.  There were sculptures by Michelangelo and Rodin too but the ornate palace rooms did major competition with the works of art housed in the palace.



Wednesday was up and at ‘em again with a bus ride to the town of Pushkin.  Here was Catherine the Great’s summer palace and garden with all the gilt, glamour and pomp of Versailles.  One of the highlights of the palace was the newly opened Amber Room.  The Germans occupied the palace during WW II and destroyed it when they left, looting the original wall panels of amber, which people are still looking for today.



On the way to Pushkin we saw where the Germans were halted in WW II and where they bombarded Leningrad with artillery.  Luckily the artillery of that day only reached the outer limits of the city and did not destroy the beautiful buildings.  A good book to read is “The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad” by Harrison Salisbury.  Nearly a million and a half people starved in Leningrad during the siege – one of the horrors of WW II.



Our afternoon was a free time for whatever we wished but Rita and I had made previous arrangements for a private tour of places my ancestor, Ernst August Franke, lived in 1830 to 1850.  We met our guide, Vera, and van driver at our hotel and started off driving down Liteinyi Avenue, a major street where Ernst Franke’s first wife’s parents lived. Ernst and his wife may have as well.  His wife died just months after they married.  We continued on to streets where Ernst Franke lived with his second wife and children, and the cross street where his in-laws lived.  This is an area known as Hay Market and was where most German immigrants lived at that time.  Vera informed me that Fyodor Dostoevsky lived the next street over about that time and wrote “Crime and Punishment” in this setting.  This is on my list of books to read next.



After walking and photographing the streets we headed to Volkovskoe Lutheran cemetery on Vasilevsky Island.  There are records of Frankes buried here but no proof they are my ancestors.  There were several tombstones written in German and Vera showed us one crypt which started out in German in the 1700s but when the Soviets took over in early 1900s the tombstone had to be inscribed in Russian language.  Unfortunately the cemetery is in major disrepair and records are difficult to research.  Next Vera took us to some Lutheran churches, the first, St. Michaels, was built in 1856 so he couldn’t have attended that one.  We went to St. Catherine’s, an older Lutheran church, but it was closed and windows still bricked up.  St. Peters was next and it is in the best condition.  It has been nicely restored today and it is the oldest Lutheran church in St. Petersburg having been given the land by Peter the Great in 1727 and built in 1728.  I was able to buy a small history of Germans in St. Petersburg but it is in German and Russian – not English.  It will take me a while to read.



The Communists did a job on churches throughout Russia when they took over.  Many were turned into warehouses and storage areas.  St. Peters Lutheran church was converted into an indoor swimming pool in 1960.  I guess it is surprising that there wasn’t more bloodshed when the Soviet Union fell. 



Our tour ended with Vera and we said our goodbyes and wished her good luck.  She was our best tour guide of the bunch.  In the evening we had a group dinner at a typical Russian restaurant called Na Zdorov’e which translates to something like Cheers, a Russian toast when drinking.  The food was all right but nothing great.  We sat at a table with the four little Italian ladies who thought Rita spoke Italian since she popped off with some phrases beforehand.  Actually we were able to carry on a fairly long discussion throughout the meal and learned a lot about them, their children, and where they were from.  I guess we know more Italian than we thought.



Thursday we headed west towards Estonia, leaving Russia at the border town of Ivangorod and crossing the Narva River into the town with the same name.  We stopped in Narva to have lunch and tour the Hermann Fortress.  The old town of Narva was mostly German built and occupied but was destroyed by bombing during WW II.  My great-great-grandmother, Maria Catharina Hoffmann, was from Narva and was Ernst Franke’s second wife in St. Petersburg.  There is a fort on each side of the Narva River – one in Estonia and one in Russia.  The one in Estonia was started in the 13^th century when under control of the Danes.  It has been occupied by Swedes and Russians before Estonia became an independent nation.  We climbed the tower, called Tall Hermann, for great views of the surrounding landscape.



We arrived in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, in the afternoon and checked into our nice Revel Olympia Hotel.  We walked into Old Town, a medieval walled city center with many nice outdoor cafes.  Tallinn still has about 2 kilometers of the old city walls and 20 of its original 46 towers, some with interesting names such as Fat Margaret and Kiek in de Kok (peek in the kitchen).  Tallinn was one of the cities in the Hanseatic League and was heavily influenced by Germans in the 16^th through 18^th centuries.  Many of the wall paintings in old buildings have German script. 



Friday morning we had a walking tour of Old Town with our guide, Andres.  He was on his home territory here.  Andres was very nice and had a wealth of historical knowledge but he had few people skills and spoke like a robot.  I kept looking for the button that turned him on and off.  We had a good tour starting at the upper town where aristocracy lived then down into the lower town.  We toured many fine churches, guild houses, back alleys and ended up at the town hall in the city square.  There was a medieval fair going on with vendors in costumes selling hand made items or food stuffs. 



After a quick lunch we headed by bus to the suburbs where Peter the Great built his wife, Catherine, a palace which is called Kadriorg Palace.  It was built in 1718 and is an art museum today.  In the evening a group of us went to a medieval style restaurant called Olde Hansa.  The staff was in period costumes and play acted in medieval ways.  Our heavy medieval meal started off with ale – I took honey beer which was too sweet for me – and dark rye bread with nuts or white bread with herbs.  We had a starter tray of olives, pickles, horseradish, a creamy cheese, jellied meat and pickled vegetables.  I don’t think medieval Europe had olives but I could be wrong.  Next came a course of baked cheese with herbs and juniper berries.  This was followed by barley with hazelnuts, gingered turnips, lentils and smoked sauerkraut.  We began jokes about why this restaurant was on our last evening schedule since nobody wanted to be together on a bus the next day.  The main course was pork marinated in beer and smoked chicken in almond sauce.  Dessert was a cake turnover with saffron cream sauce.  It was filling but not especially tasty. 



Our tour officially ended Saturday morning and we told our tour mates goodbye.  We had booked an additional night in Tallinn and began a tour of Old Town on our own.  We spent the day at the medieval fair and re-visiting some of the places we missed the day before.  We also went inside some of the churches we only viewed from the outside previously.  We stumbled onto a nice concert in St. Mary’s Lutheran church, the oldest in Tallinn.  In the evening we had an excellent meal at Senso restaurant, one that would garner Michelin mention if they covered this part of the world.



Rita and I had another city we wanted to visit while in the area.  We took a bus on our own to Riga, Latvia on Sunday and checked into a nice small hotel located in the embassy district of town.  Riga doesn’t have nearly as much of its medieval city center remaining as Tallinn does but it does have beautiful art nouveau architecture, especially in the part of town where our hotel was located.  Much of Riga reminded us of Vienna or Paris.



We went to the top of the tallest hotel in Riga, the Revel Hotel Latvija, and had a Cesu beer at the Skyline bar on the 26^th floor.  We enjoyed great views of Riga and were getting our bearings until the large beer hit home.  We did some walking around the center of this beautiful city and ended up having a super dinner at the Otto Schwarz restaurant.



Monday morning Rita didn’t feel well so I went looking at art nouveau buildings in our area and then into city center to view the highlights such as the town hall square, Blackhead house, Liv square, large and small guild halls, Riga Dom and much more.  I had lunch at a typical Latvian restaurant called Lido.  In the afternoon Rita was feeling better and we walked back into city center and had a light dinner outside.



Tuesday we walked around Riga and took the elevator up into the bell tower of St. Peters Lutheran church with great views of the city.  We went to the city market which is housed in large buildings which we were told were old Zeppelin hangers.  I wish I could confirm that – my guide book didn’t mention them.  We saw many beautiful art nouveau buildings and some medieval ones as well.  



Wednesday was a travel day flying back home in Athens and Thursday I took off from work to rest up from our strenuous travel.  This traveling business is hard work, but somebody has to do it.