Heading out of St Petersburg we arrived in Veliky Novgorod. At first this was just another city to us, but research later prevailed and it is known as the birthplace of Russia. It is one of the oldest towns in Russia. Wandering around the ancient Kremlin (with scaffolding almost equally ancient) I was astounded by beautiful churches and giant monuments, one of these captured my eye much more than the rest. It is called the Monument of Russia and one it are hundreds of carvings of Russian leaders and people of significance in Russian history. This is not what fascinated me though. During WW2 when the area had been completely taken over by the Nazis, they had actually dismantled it in preparation to take it back to Germany. The Red Army recovered it when they regained the city and put it back together. The whole story blows my mind.
The next part of our journey blew my mind even more. Let me backtrack a little and tell you how we are working our journey. Basically, I look at a map and pick out a town/city that is a reasonable distance in the right direction. I then do a quick google search for places to stay and see. Looking at Dzerzhinsk it seemed the right distance away, but further reading led me to find out it is pretty much the most polluted city on the planet after a whole lot of improper chemical waste dumping between 1930 and 1998. Of course we had to see it. I’m not sure exactly what we were expecting, but it wasn’t what we expected. It’s a large city with large official looking buildings, shopping malls with all the western style shops and plenty of people walking around seemingly unaware that the life expectancy is supposedly in your 40s! The articles I read were American and British and the Russians do just not seem to believe them, I guess blaming the vodka and cigarettes for the early deaths. We stayed 50km down the road in Nizhny Novgorod, a beautiful city on the junction of the rivers Volga and Oka. It too has a rapidly declining population, but is still Russia’s fifth biggest city. There are plenty of factories still and loads of places of employment in the area to entice people to stay and even move here. Polluted or not it is a place rich with culture and history and still plenty of beautiful people.
The birthplace of Russia
