Today we were off on an excursion out of the town – no one had any idea before we left where to so I took the opportunity to get out early and try and catch a bit of the sunrise in the park around the hotel. The sun rose through the trees and walk-ways at near on 9:30 as I hoped. Its a completely different world here, long cold nights and days in which the sun barely rises high enough to warm it. The sun’s low arc throwing sideways light for most of the day – great for that lovely golden light photographers seek in most landscapes but confirmation of how much further north we were than the UK.

You wouldn’t get chased off these park benches in a hurry!

We set off through the town in a bus that I suspected used part of its exhaust to heat the inside, each time the engine rev’ed I got a fresh waft of diesel fumes. Great idea, poor execution [unless execution really was your idea...]. Yekaterinburg is an industrial town, famous in the area for its ‘plants’, one such plant was so vast it took us a good 10mins to drive the length of one side of it – on the inside it has its own tramway system. I’m pretty sure this was the factory that build other factories but I could be wrong.

Our first port of call was the aforementioned Church on the Blood, it was build in the area of the building that the Russian Royal family was shot in during the early hours of 17th July 1918, the royal line ended as Lenin’s revolution took hold. For 80 odd years the political climate prevented any such monuments to be built but with the fall of communism the dormant history could be commemorated appropriately. There are many features of the church that echo the past, a statue of the royal family stands beneath a cross, in the arms of Nicholas II is Alexei (his only son) who suffered from haemophilia (a disease carried in the royal blood from Queen Victoria, Alexei’s great-grandmother) – who was treated by the well known, and perhaps infamous, Rasputin who gained the trust of the royal family but perhaps damaged the image of the royals by becoming more of an advisor than a priest/healer. His life is somewhat muddled in places, especially his death…
Around the statue are 23 steps leading from the lower level of the church to the upper level, this holds two representations; firstly the number of steps leading down to the basement in which the royals were shot and secondly the number of years Nicholas II was on the throne.

to be continued…