Peter the Great was tsar when E-burg was founded in 1723. The tsarina was Catherine I, but the city wasn’t named after her – it was named in honor of her patron, St. Catherine. So why wasn’t the city called St. Ekaterinburg, similar to St. Petersburg? Don’t know.
There’s more to say about this place name. E-k-a-t-e-r-i-n-b-u-r-g is close to the Russian spelling, which has a few Cyrillic characters thrown in that I can’t produce in this blog. The pronunciation is Ye-ka-TER-in-burg, hence the spelling in English usually begins with a Y, and that’s likely the way you’ll see the city on a map (Yeltsin’s name, by the way, transliterated from Russian, is Eltsin.)
The Governor’s Palace, pictured here, is from tsarist times. Like other buildings of this era, it has a stucco façade and lots of ornamentation. Buildings from pre-revolutionary times are often brightly restored with the pastel colors used in Europe during earlier epochs. But such restoration is expensive, and not all old buildings get this loving treatment.
No comments:
Post a Comment