Graveyard Girls

Kira and I have made an awesome discovery: Russian cemeteries. They are fantastic. Wooded, lots of little paths to walk down, neat old graves, quaint chapels, and few people. They're the quietest place to hang out in all of Piter, and it's like getting to wander around the forest without leaving the city.

Russian cemeteries are more haphazard than American ones. Plots are demarcated by little wrought-iron fences, within which are often little benches and tables - Russians picnic when they visit their dead. In older sections, sometimes a path will suddenly be interrupted by a grave; old graves have sometimes been split apart by trees growing through them.

Our first venture to a cemetery was a couple Fridays ago. The weather was nice, I had a couple hours to kill, and Kira suggested we try to find the grave of the holy fool Ksenia, the patron saint of Petersburg. We never did find her tomb, but we had such a nice time wandering about that we decided to do it again the next week.

The second cemetery we visited was near-ish Kira's apartment, way out on the Northeast edge of town. Nestled between an industrial area and a dog pound, the roaring sounds of the street and the incessant barking of dogs is instantly muffled by the stillness of the necropolis; it was peaceful and wooded and wild. It was also a swamp. Literally. We wandered for a good two hours, found the chapel (it was locked up - they're usually only open for funerals), found the newest section, where they were digging a grave, and then wandered back into an older section, where it just got muckier and muckier, until we were literally climbing around the edges of plots trying to keep our feet dry. The idea of dead people water was a little gross, so I was glad when we finally found our way back to dry land. We followed a duck waddling among the graves for a few minutes, tried to get a good picture of a raven on a gravestone, spent some time at a reflecting pool at a war memorial on the edge of the cemetary. I got teary when I saw the graves of people born in 1984 - my age. What would they be doing now if they'd lived?

Perhaps not the most joyous places to hang out, but the cemetaries of Piter are some of the most peaceful places I've found here. If you get the chance to visit any Russian cemetary, I say go for it. They're facsinating places.