21st April 2014 - Easter in Irkutsk

Saturday 21^st April, I had the pleasure of being sick. After this my skin was hypersensitive.

     I got up again at 4.45, this time to get ready to get off the train. We arrived at IRKUTSK at about 5.40 when it was still dark. Onto the platform, down a subway and out the station house. We got onto a bus, drove over the Angara River and to the Intourist Hotel, Room 808 with Arthur. It was starting to get light. [I always remember my father's good friend Ross Harding delighting in pronouncing "Irkutsk". He and his wife Elizabeth inspired me to take the Trans-Siberian Railway, as they had done the trip a few years before.]

Irkutsk Station by someone. In Soviet times, taking photos of stations was forbidden.

     After getting my suitcase I had a shower and went to bed, to get up again at 9.30 – breakfast time. I had to go down the stairs because the jolty lifts couldn’t be bothered coming up. I ate a bit of bread and drank a lot of apple juice (hooray!) with iced water, then went back upstairs to sleep. Meanwhile, others were on a tour of the city.

A View of the Intourist Hotel in Irkutsk, but which is Room 808? photo by Katy Fon Forest

    At one o’clock I got up again, bought four postcards with stamps, 1.54 roubles, and went to lunch with the Hampsons, Dickinsons and Grace. Ate a little bit of bread and meat, drank a red cinnamon drink.

    After lunch I went to bed again to sleep, waking up at five. I got up feeling much better and much less stiff, so I went for a walk in the surrounding Irkutsk. I went along the river bank and up a street where there was, according to Sandy, a statue of Lenin.

    There had been a fall of snow in the morning but it had melted by lunchtime, so some of the streets were a little muddy. The trees are bare, the streets are wide and all of the few cars I saw were very dirty. I saw a couple of turkeys – real ones.

     I went back to the hotel at six for dinner – meat and rice, more cinnamon drink and a sweet biscuit with a sort of meringue concoction on top. Sat with Elly and Jane, Anne and Geoff, Grace, Felix and Shirley.

     After dinner I went upstairs to write postcards and this diary but slept instead, while most people went to see the circus, which, apparently, was mostly bears doing unnatural things.

     But at a quarter to eleven, a group of us gathered in the lobby, walked along the river road, turned left up a street, turned left again, then right up a hill to the gates of a church. There was quite a crowd and we were only allowed through a narrow gate.

     Never having been inside a Russian church before, I found it was nothing like what one would expect. Just inside to the left were some steps upon which sat little old ladies holding out their hands.

Inside the room where what I suppose was the service in progress, people were packed tight and there was some pushing and shoving, There were no pews.

     On the walls were some very beautiful religious paintings in the Russian style, lit up by the stands of candles that people had bought. The room was surprisingly small, and through an archway painted like marble was a smaller area where a priest was chanting. I only got a short glimpse of him because of the crowd of people around him. It was so close in there, but interesting to see the faces of the various people, especially the old ladies’ faces surrounded by headscarves.

This seems to be the church we went to, though at night. Photo by Tsvik Ilya.

     As church services go, it didn’t seem very well organized, but this was because, as I found out the morning after, it didn’t really get started until about half past twelve, by which time I was in the hair-raising hotel lift on the way to bed.

     [Russian Orthodox Easter is held on a different day from Western Easter – usually - though in 2014 it was on the same day.]