Weekly Photo Challenge: Intricate, GUM Department Store in Moscow

GUM – the most famous department store in Moscow

This mall was built in the late nineteenth century to replace a covered market and originally contained over a thousand stores.  It is built on three levels with a vaulted glass roof and even today resembles a modern cathedral.  On this first visit, thirsty and hungry we ignored the rows of designer shops and made for No. 57 CTOΛOBAЯ, the recommended restaurant on the third floor with a noble history of providing good quality, reasonably priced food for the proletariat.

We picked up a tray, waited in line, selected our food and took it to our chosen table and it turned out to be really, really good, probably the best meal we had had so far in Russia.

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Cities of Eastern Europe – Moscow

Etched in my mind are grainy images from the 1960s of Russia’s annual May Day Parade when a cheerless looking Politburo would sit close to Lenin’s tomb and watch an endless procession of goose stepping troops and weapons of mass destruction that were going to wipe us off the face of the earth troop by in what seemed to be a provocative display deliberately choreographed to create paranoia and fear in the west.

The pictures were always dull, grainy and grey and my image of Moscow was always that it was a lacklustre, soulless and dreary place so what a surprise it was now to find a vibrant and colourful scene, a square brimming with activity and effervescent energy, a vibrant place with happy smiling people, exciting and lively and crowned by the iconic brightly painted onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral at the opposite end.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says

 

No 57 CTOΛOBAЯ

On the first day in Moscow at lunchtime we went to a shopping mall to find a restaurant.  Not just any shopping mall however but ‘Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin’ or GUM, the most famous department store in Moscow.  The once grim and dingy store filled with the endless queues that epitomised the Soviet era is now a fashionable, airy building full of fountains, flowers, bars and restaurants that stretches along one side of Red Square.  It was built in the late nineteenth century to replace a covered market and originally contained over a thousand stores.  It is built on three levels with a vaulted glass roof and even today resembles a modern cathedral.

On this first visit, thirsty and hungry we ignored the rows of designer shops and made for No 57 CTOΛOBAЯ, the recommended restaurant on the third floor with a noble history of providing good quality, reasonably priced food for the proletariat.

We picked up a tray, waited in line, selected our food and took it to our chosen table and it turned out to be really, really good, probably the best meal we had had so far in Russia and it amused me to think that we were sitting here in the historic centre of Moscow, of Soviet era Russia, in a westernised shopping mall that represented everything that communism stood against: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, a laudable but ultimately unachievable state of Utopia that could naturally be delivered without shops.

Lenin closed the mall and Stalin converted it into State administrative offices.  They must be spinning in their graves – well, not Lenin of course because he is still laid out in his mausoleum on permanent public display patiently waiting for a spinning opportunity!

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate

GUM – the most famous department store in Moscow

This mall was built in the late nineteenth century to replace a covered market and originally contained over a thousand stores.  It is built on three levels with a vaulted glass roof and even today resembles a modern cathedral.  On this first visit, thirsty and hungry we ignored the rows of designer shops and made for No. 57 CTOΛOBAЯ, the recommended restaurant on the third floor with a noble history of providing good quality, reasonably priced food for the proletariat.  We picked up a tray, waited in line, selected our food and took it to our chosen table and it turned out to be really, really good, probably the best meal we had had so far in Russia.

Read the full story…

 

Russia, Caviar, Millionaires and Paupers

Red Square is a place that I think I would find difficult to tire of and we walked through Resurrection Gate and in the shadow of the red brick history museum looked down and marvelled again at the multi-coloured domes of St. Basil’s, at the granite blocks of the Lenin Mausoleum on one side and the cream facade of GUM shopping arcade on the other.

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Russia, Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral

Like a lot of other people I suppose I used to believe that this was called Red Square because of the association with Communism but in fact the name has nothing to do with the link between the colour red and political philosophy or from the colour of the bricks of the buildings around it either.

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Russia, Moscow and Red Square

I was impatient to go through the main gates into Red Square but Galina held us all up with some unnecessary commentary and so I wandered off ahead of the group and towards the Resurrection Gate (demolished by Stalin in 1931 and rebuilt in 1995) and into a cobbled area next to which on one side was the green and ochre Kazan Cathedral (demolished by Stalin in 1936 and rebuilt in 1995) and the red brick Russian historical museum (which for some reason Stalin didn’t demolish) and in front of me Red Square, a place that I had never dared to imagine that I would ever visit.

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