Grammy Remembers

Mama Buzz sent me a photo of their new geography book.

I wrote back: “Tell the kids I stood in front of the building on the cover (St. Basils in Moscow). It left me breathless. It is SO beautiful in real life!!”

Mama responded with a request for dates and details for Bunny, who loves to know that stuff. My reply got a bit long, but also interesting, so I thought I’d share it with all y’all. 🙂

I went to Europe when I was 11 with Uncle Tom and Mither, which was my first time behind the Iron Curtain. We went to Budapest, Hungary. My second trip was to the U.S.S.R. with a high school sponsored tour in April of 1972. I was not quite 18 years old. We visited Helsinki, Leningrad, and Moscow.

I was a senior in high school and it was spring break. We were in Helsinki for Western Easter, which was on April 2. Then we were in Moscow for Orthodox Easter, which was April 9. THE most amazing thing happened on that last night in Moscow. Our hotel, Metropol, was and is very close to Red Square.

It was our last night and some of us girls decided to take one last stroll around Red Square before bed to see St. Basil’s lit up at night. Sadly, the interior was under renovation in 1972, so we never got to see any of the inside.

We made a loop from the gate down to the cathedral, then back to the gate. That whole dark gray area on the satellite photo is paved. It is surrounded by buildings and walls except at the two ends.

We went past Lenin’s tomb, which is even creepier at night than it is during the day!

We went past GUM (goom) department store, which is absolutely ginormous! Somewhere in the middle of Red Square, two Russian guys used signs to invite us to come home with them to “sleep.” Yeah, no thanks!

As we were walking out of Red Square and back to the Metropol, we looked across the park to the left and saw that the windows of a  multi-story building were lit up with a perfect Sign of the Cross! It could not have been an accident. I have often wondered if whoever did that got in trouble for celebrating Easter right across from Red Square, which was basically a monument to godless Communism!

P.S. Under the Soviet government, St. Basil’s was used as a museum. Religious services were not permitted until 1991 when the Soviet Union fell.