Russia: Day Three, Part Two

After lunch we climb back up the hill, all the better to help digest those potatoes, and make ourselves a bit more presentable.  Because we’re going to tea at the home of a real prince.
  A friend of the Prince comes to guide our bus.  His name is Nikolaï and he’s a photographer who once lived and worked in Morocco.  Extremely friendly and proficient in French, he will travel with us tomorrow as well.
  Prince Andreï Borissovitch Fitse-Lanskoï, whom we shall now just call Andreï, also speaks French because he lived in France.  As a matter of fact, I believe he was born there. He’s too young to have been born in Russia pre-1917; his family surely fled the new-born Soviet régime.  And France was good to him; he worked in the upper echelons of the French civil service system.
  Andreï introduces us to his second wife, a Russian woman he met when he decided not so long ago to move back.  She shows us around the house, which was built 185 years ago.  That may be old compared to my house in Ann Arbor, built in 1950, but my artist’s studio in Paris was built in 1870 so I’m used to old homes.  The Lanskoï home is all wood and lovingly decorated.



  Madame has set out a lovely spread for us in the garden.  There’s champagne, but also strong tea in a silver samovar.  And plenty of canapes and cakes to eat.  Our Michel opens the champagne and pours while Aude slices and serves the cake. Conversations fuse in all directions and in many languages.  I find myself speaking with Nikolaï mostly, us both being interested in photography. These people are warm and welcoming, and we all feel at home, royal title or not.
  Then a Russian Orthodox priest appears and Vladimir teases me that they’ve called him to come re-baptize me.  Actually Father Igor has come to meet us all and join in the fun and the goodies.  He offers to take us all to see his church, built in 1672, and the French contingent jumps at the chance; the Russians stay behind with Madame.

After a short ride past fields and houses, we enter a tiny, visibly poor village.  At its edge stands a church in sore need of work, which is what it’s now getting.  The restoration has revealed even older vestiges underneath, foundations with vaulted arches.  Inside, the brick walls are still whitewashed, but the ceiling exposes worn red brick and thick white mortar holding it all together, with some help from The Good Lord.
       Father Igor is very proud of his church, and rightfully so.  What amazes me is all the icons.  So many of them for such a small country church!  And we can get right up and personal with them, even touch them if we want, which isn’t the case elsewhere we’ve been or will go.  Quite a few of the icons - and there are many of them - are in solid silver frames elaborately and intricately decorated.  Handiworks of incredible mastery.  I wonder who made them.  Someone local or were they a gift from well beyond this little village?  During the Communist period, the church was closed but the icons were left inside.  Everyone knew they were there, and poor as they were, no one stole them.  Or damaged them out of atheistic scorn.  “The countryside still believed and protected,” Father Igor explains when I ask how that was possible.  It also explains the sudden explosion of religiosity after perestroïka.  Vladimir adds a quote from Pushkin: “Without the church, there would be no Russia”.

        The building may be in need of care, but the cemetery that wraps around three sides of the church is carefully tended, with flowers and flowering shrubs abundant.  There are many graves but no one remembers who is buried where, except for those graves with headstones.
       This is the closest I feel I get to understanding Russia during the entire trip.

Mandylion Church, 17th c

Tonight we’re invited to dinner at Anna’s.  She’s the person housing the others in our party.  It’s a small home, much too small for the eight people sleeping there.  And with only one bathroom.  But Anna has roofed in her terrace and made it into a large gazebo where tables have been set up and food laid out. Soup for a starter and then some of those smoked fish we saw being sold by the river this morning.  One fish for each, but most share one between two of us.  Vlad, who always walks around with a plastic bag, stuffs one whole fish in it and takes it up to his room.  Perhaps he wakes up hungry in the night; he has a healthy appetite and there’s a lot of him to keep fed.
  Ursula and I are feeling a bit tired and in need of some quiet time, so we get directions to walk back to the motel, down old roads bordered by towering trees.  As it’s late June, the sun is just now setting and the birds are making that chuckling kind of song they make when settling down for the night.  But our guardian angel Nikolaï won’t hear of it, whips out his keys and drives us back, ever the gentleman.
       Another full day, complete with a Russian prince.  Literally a royal welcome.