This huge, dumb land.

Another day with the family, another day of pretending to be a tourist in the city I live in. Today we went on a visit to The Kremlin. I should start charging for my tour guide services - I will have visited there 4 times by the time I leave Russia…


…Although I should probably credit Rough Guides for all my knowledge.

After Red Square, The Kremlin is Moscow’s biggest tourist attraction. In Russian ‘kreml’ means fortress so I think most people (or maybe just my parents) imagine it to be very military based and are quite surprised by what it actually is - a load of cathedrals in a square, a museum and a little park.

The Cathedrals are all very nice and ornate but I have the belief that once you’ve seen one Russian Cathedral you’ve seen them all. There are only so many icons of Jesus I can take.

My favourite part of The Kremlin is the Armoury Palace. In here you can see the thrones, carriages and clothes of Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great and other Russian Tsars. As a girl who still dreams of one day being a Princess (Sarah means Princess… it WILL happen) I love anything to do with Royal Families. Especially dresses and carriages.

Two of the most famous sights of the Kremlin are The Tsar Bell and Cannon, the largest bell and cannon in the world.




Stupidly, because they’re so big the cannon has never actually been used to fire anything and the bell fell down as soon as it was hung, which brings me to one of my favourite quotes about Moscow, a nice ending to this post:

“in Moscow every foreigner is taken to look at the great cannon and the great ball – the cannon which cannot be fired and the bell which fell down before it was rung. It is an amazing town in which the objects of interest are distinguished by their absurdity, or perhaps that great bell without a tongue is a hieroglyph symbolic of this huge, dumb land.”
- Pyotr Chaadaev, a nineteenth century dissident.