Day 01
Saint Petersburg Intrigue, Palaces, and Imperial History
- Meet your Saint Petersburg tour guide and visit places surrounded by intrigue, mysteries, plots, and even murder, as happened all too often in Russian history.
- Visit one of the most romantic places in St. Petersburg, St. Michael's Castle, designed by Paul to protect himself from plotters. Even so, he could not escape his destiny and died a tragic death, just as the prophecies had predicted.
- Examine the Church of the Saviour on Blood, a Russian Revival-style cathedral built on the very spot where Alexandr II, the Liberator, died in a terrorist bombing.
- Continue to the Marble Palace, made of red granite that gives off a lovely afterglow at sunset. It was a parting gift from Catherine the Great to one of her lovers, Grigory Orlov, who brought her to power and later may even have initiated the killing of her deposed husband because he wanted to marry her but could not do so while Peter III was still alive.
- Learn the story of Paul I, the "Russian Hamlet," Catherine's sociopathic son.
- Uncover how Alexandr I became deeply religious at the end of his life and marched across Europe to liberate it from the menace of the Antichrist, personified as Napoleon, yet failed to carry out the reforms he had so enthusiastically begun in his own country at the start of his reign.
- Find out about Alexandr II, the son of Nicolas I, who gave freedom to the serfs, and how his assassination changed the course of Russian history.
