Thread by @ImperiiaProject

Let's go. #Russia1914. A voyage down the Volga. With one incongruous aside as preamble, which is as follows: I have been using a clam shell to stay the pages of my copy of the Handbook while I work at my perch at the kitchen table.

The Volga River. Centuries ago it was the Atel. Or Etel. Or Itel. (Those pesky ambiguous primary vowels.) Centuries before that it was the Rha. The Oaros.

It probably still is all those things. Names piling in its throat like silt at its mouth.

Baedeker babbles on and on about the river. About the way it rises in the Valdai Hills. About its length. Its fall. Its entry into the Caspian Sea. The diluvial deposits that muddy its water. The traces of its ancient bed visible in the hardened, grassy surface of the steppe.

About hills of clay and loam. The low marshes and forests that line its upper reaches. Then the right bank's steep slopes and eminences.

A highway for thousands of steamships freighting grain and petroleum and salt.

A thoroughfare for rafts floating timber.

A fishing ground rich with sturgeon and sterlet.

"The scenery is nowhere of an imposing character," warns Baedeker, and the voyage is "very fatiguing." But the journey will "recall the peculiar and intense colouring of evening scenes on the Nile."

So we shall see how the ancient Oaros - the Russian Nile, the Matushka Volga - fills my eyes.

#Russia1914 Tver. A good sleep for a ruble at the Centralnaya Hotel. A decent meal. A day in a provincial capital of 62,500 souls. I wandered the length of Millionnaya Street to take in its churches, bazaar, public garden, and the once-palace-now-museum.

None of which, I fear, is quite as important as the Morozov cotton mill, to which, I confess, I failed to pay attention.

A trip with the izvoshtchik to the pier for 40 kopeks.

At the end of a promenade lined with trees I boarded the steamer. scalar.fas.harvard.edu/imperiia/tver-1

#Russia1914 We sailed past a convent. And past an unremarkable town. Then a village remarkable for its boot manufacturies. Then a town smaller than the village. Sigh. It is 8 hours from Tver to Ruibinsk.

#Russia1914 No, no. I have it wrong. (My dogears and marginalia are bound to get me in trouble along the way.) The fare to Ruibinsk cost 8 rubles but the passage will take two days. Goodness. I have two days to watch the banks of the Volga rise and sink.

#Russia1914 Korcheva. I fell into a pleasant conversion on deck with a gentleman who told me that the town had been a village for centuries until one day, in 1781, Empress Catherine II declared it otherwise.

Korcheva thrived. That is, it thrived until the railways bypassed it to the east and west. A common enough tale.
Yet in the moments it took to pass through, I was overcome with a fleeting sense of nostalgia for a place I will never know. #Russia1914

#Russia1914 I have been observing my fellow passengers: the merchants, managers, and occasional itinerant artists in 1st class, the priests, young officers, clerks, and students in 2nd. The nobles are nowhere: they consider Samolyot steamers dangerous and uninteresting.

#Russia1914 Priluki. The banks of the Volga rise and sink.
There is nothing more to say.

#Russia1914 Uglich. Site of the murder of Dmitrii, son of Ivan the Terrible, in 1591, and thus the site of a somber "church on the blood." The tsarevich's palace, also visible from the steamer landing, is a bit of a tourist trap. All reproductions and recreations. Fair warning.

#Russia1914 Ruibinsk (Rybinsk). 48 hours on a steamboat is long enough. The Cathedral of the Transfiguration sits on the Volga quay, but I went in search of #caviar, this being a hub of the industry. I was back on board within an hour, my mouth salty and amused.

#Russia1914 The caviar was a welcome diversion. (Sigh.) We are now below Rybinsk. The scenery has become monotonous, just as Baedeker said it would. "Broad and dotted with numerous sandbanks."

#Russia1914 Romanov-Borisoglyebsk, which we are passing, is another in the long series of district towns. Just how many does the Russian Empire have? I am beginning to think this is an empire composed of nothing but diminutive district towns and overgrown villages.

#Russia1914 I have just seen a phoenix-monastery.

I like my term, despite its vague irreverence. In this case, it refers to the Tolgski Monastery. Born in 1314, it rose from the ashes of destruction at the hands of the Poles.

Such is the common glory of sacred ruins.

#Russia1914 Yaroslavl. The Cathedral of the Annunciation marks the steamboat landing. From here it is 7 hours upriver to Rybinsk and 32 hours downriver to Nizhnii-Novgorod.

(Yes, I am endlessly calculating distances and durations. What else is there to do?)

There are 4 hotels in this ancient city and I have been in Russia long enough now to find such a thing remarkable.

But to be fair, this is a provincial capital with 112,000 inhabitants. It is prosperous. It is the seat of an archbishop. It once gave refuge to an exiled duke. It is picturesque.

There is a seminary and a lyceum. There are bridges and palaces and squares. There is a theater and a proper restaurant - the Buttler - with a concert-garden.

I have come to think of Yaroslavl as a city of holy doors and gilded domes.

I needed a sidetrack and one appeared, leading all the way (all 35 miles) to Rostov.

#Russia1914 This town has old bones. You can feel them under your feet and when you place your palms on the smooth stone of the church walls. Its age is in the lake water and in the enameled eyes of the saints.

An abundance of fish, an embarrassment of market-gardens. Frescoed walls and a fortress with ten round towers. #Rostov #RussianHistory

I purchased a guidebook at the museum. In exchange for 50 kopeks, I am now in possession of 51 pages of text I cannot decipher.

(The pages puzzle in return, wondering why their exuberance has no effect on me.) #Rostov #localhistory

#Russia1914 We passed Sopelki before my morning coffee. It is, apparently, "a village where the so-called Byegunes or Stranniki, a sect of the Raskolniks, originated at the end of the 18th century." #Volga

#Russia1914 I would have said I was diligent, but apparently there were gaps in my research. Maybe I will look up these Byegunes and Stranniki when I return to London. Most likely I will forget. And spend the rest of my life wallowing in ignorance. #Early20thCenturyEnnui

#Russia1914 Babaiki. The convent of St. Nicholas the Wonder Worker is perched near the river bank.

I am entertaining thoughts of pilgrimage and despair as we navigate the sandy islands that riddle the Volga.

#Russia1914 Kostroma. It was here, in this terraced, church-studded city, that Mikhail Fedorovich accepted the crown, establishing the Romanov dynasty.

Did he do it graciously? The guidebook didn't say...

#Russia1914 I breezed past the Romanov Museum on Pavlovskaya, en route to the Ipatiyev Monastery. Its cathedral, like Kostroma itself, is a pastiche of initiation, rebuilding, and reimagining. A heady mixture. scalar.fas.harvard.edu/imperiia/kostr…

#Russia1914 Krasnoye. I was surprised to come upon a village full of jewelry shops. Baedeker mentions that one can buy ornaments, but gives no sense of the scale and energy of workshops brimming with copper- and silversmiths. #RussianHistory

#Russia1914 Kineshma. The Volga and Kineshemka flow together, and a railway runs to it. #RussianRivers

#Russia1914 Reshma. A village with a convent. Or perhaps a convent with a village? #VolgaHistory

#Russia1914 Yuryevets. The Unzha meets the Volga. My nose was buried in a book and I almost missed it. But the confluence of two rivers is almost always worth looking up from the page.

#Russia1914 Katunki. The Volga is slowly growing more spectacular. Its bed is growing broader. The right bank is rising more precipitously with each passing hour. #VolgaRiver #HistoryOfTravel

#Russia1914 Vasilyev (Chkalov if you were to search for it on a modern map - though that map might not tell you that most of the old village was submerged by the Gorky reservoir project).

One wonders why the steamer calls here.

#Russia1914 A friend told me that in the 1870s, Russian painters decided their countryside was beautiful. That the beauty of Russia was as romantic as the beauty of Italy. They went out in search of it (the beauty).

They found it and transposed it onto canvas. And eventually, the light and labor and elevation and ponderous stillness of the Volga made its way to St. Petersburg.

I saw it there. Or I thought I did.

Now that I am here, on the river, watching it bend and eddy, I can see the painting. It sits on the wall of the Museum of Russian Art, 500 miles away, and swims before my eyes.

#Russia1914 Gorodets. Baedeker says the locals take pride in knowing Saint Alexander Nevsky died here in 1263. And that they occupy themselves producing honey-cakes. I wonder. Were they making honey-cakes while the prince was among them? I like to think they were.

#Russia1914 Balakhna. Another in the long line of district capitals rooted in the banks of the great river. This one offers the traveler an ephemeral view of the great city of Nizhny-Novgorod. So they say. We shall see.

#Russia1914 Sormova. Foundries and a machine-shop. Oh dear. But I armed myself with maps in London. They are my protection from unwelcome conversation and the loneliness of my compartment.

Besides, every once in a while I prefer to study the river on paper, where it is more easily understood. (Otherwise the constant subtlety of the water exhausts my eyes.)

I like to pull back and look past the land and sky beyond my window to the broadest reach of the Volga. Down through the soil, through clay and trees and rock, out to the edges of the watershed itself. I imagine I can feel it all moving as I sit with my fingers on the map.

#Russia1914 Nizhny Novgorod.
This is where Russia became an empire before my eyes.
I slunk through the labyrinthine streets and lurked in the shadows of market stalls.
I found a Book of Gospels dating to 1408 in the treasury of the Cathedral of the Transfiguration.

I bought raisins and pistachios, dried peaches and wine.
I wondered the terraced gardens overlooking the Volga.
I stood reverently in front of wonder-working icons.
My day bore a tinge of adventure.
It was satisfying.

#Russia1914 Rabotki.
I have been looking forward to this stage of the voyage. Villages full of charm and color. Houses and church cupolas painted in all sorts of tints. Groves of linden and oak set against the white sandy banks of the river. #Volga #oldworldcharm

#Russia1914 Lyskovo. The Handbook insists this is a place notable only for being close to another place. That other place being the sort of place that once was, but no longer is, notable. (Sigh. Lyskovo seems unbothered by its proximity to the insignificance of Makar'ev.)

#Russia1914 Isadi. I overheard merchants talking about the apple market as we sailed past the Fadeyevi Hills. It seems we are deep in orchard territory.

#Russia1914 Vasilsursk. A small town "prettily situated on the terraced bank of the river, surrounded by gardens."
(Sigh. Sometimes cribbing from Baedeker just has to do.) #lazyhistory

#Russia1914 Yurin. Apparently a count named Sheremetev has a château nearby.

#Russia1914 Kozmodemyansk. One can buy walking-sticks at the pier. This is good news: the value of a walking-stick is not to be underestimated. Peter the Great himself had a great many walking sticks and was known to wave them around. Vigorously. So shall I.

#Russia1914 Tcheboksari (Cheboksary). There are curiosities everywhere, should one know where to look.
I knew only because a fellow passenger took my elbow and whispered in my ear about churches built without architects, a leaning tower, piers that launch 300 ships each year,

and ancient earthworks running down to the Volga - humble survivors of a fire that leveled even fortified walls at the end of the seventeenth century.

She told me of an icon of the Virgin Mother known to have put an end to plague and cholera, and of a life-sized wooden image of Saint Nicholas with the power to resolve any argument between Chuvash, Tatar, Cheremis, or Russian, baptized or otherwise.

We were some 16 miles downriver before the tolling of the cathedral bell died away on the wind.