The Miraculous Prince Alexander Nevsky

An icon of Prince Alexander Nevsky

We pushed through the glass doors and after hasty introduction Galya led us down the steps and toward the car. “We should get going. That person there,” Galya delivered a strafing look at the doorman, “thinks I’m a working girl trying to do business in the hotel.”

Curbside, Galya’s husband, Mitya guarded the car, his arms folded across his chest. As we approached he waved us into the vehicle. “Let’s go!” He said, hopping into the driver’s seat.

Dad and I climbed into the back seat and felt for seat belts. There were none.

“What’s the make and model?” Dad asked.

Lada VAZ

Mitya turned and grinned. “Lada VAZ,” he said, then applied a leaden foot to the gas pedal. Though the car was not his—obtained from a friend of a friend—it was his for this day and he was, it seemed, determined to explore the possibilities of the machine suspension. He was like the devil on ten ball bearings, a kid in a candy store. Enormous craters and gaping fissures in the pavement proved no obstacle to Mitya, who viewed them as mere puddles and raced toward them, dodging them at the last possible moment. Stop signs seemed to mere suggestions. Other cars were annoyances to be glared at. Trams were to be skirted around as one might a slow moving train. Fortunately they were few pedestrians about.

Galya noticed my concerted gaze on Mitya, now hunkered over the wheel, his knuckles white. He had come to a rare full-stop at an intersection, and seemed to be daring the other cars to his right and left to enter the intersection first.

“Not too many women drive here,” Galya said. “I have a driver’s license, but it’s too scary to drive in the city.”

Whether to punctuate her comment or to test it, Mitya punched the gas pedal and we lurched through the intersection and past the other vehicles. “What kind of shock absorbers come standard-issue on these?” Dad mused. A pointless question as we were discovering that in a stock Lada, the passengers are the shock absorbers. But it was a beautiful morning: the breeze coming off the gulf was cool and as my head bounced against a metal panel, I thought, this is far more exciting than anything I could have done back home like washing cars or waiting tables.

We flew past long buildings, none of them more than four or five stories high, all of them painted in fading colors of sunrise or sunset: rose, mauve, butter yellow, vegetal green until we came to the business sector, where the buildings wore more subdued colors. “This building I must point out,” Galya lifted a slim finger toward her window. “It’s the stock exchange, which is where Mitya and I first met when we worked as stockbrokers.”

“But not now?” I asked, immediately regretting the question. Of course not now. Money and jobs were scare, we’d been told by an elderly woman who sat in a metal chair at the end of the corridor of the hotel floor and held room keys for guests while they were out of their rooms. She looked so tired, and we learned that this was because she worked three twenty-four hour shifts per week, and on her days off she watched a granddaughter, so that her daughter could maintain a similar work schedule. But, she said, they were lucky: they had jobs.

“The economy just now is in the crapper,” Galya said. There was no trace of reproof in her voice—she was far too polite—only a note of resignation. “So Mitya is back to work at his old job, at the shipyard.”

At this the car lurched toward the curb and Mitya extracted the key. In a single movement he was out of the vehicle and removing the windscreen wipers which he deftly tucked under his jacket. “We’re here,” Galya announced. “Here” was Nevsky Lavra.

Alexander Nevsky Lavra

Nevsky Lavra was named after Prince Alexander Nevsky. A perusal of the kiosk literature informed us that Prince Nevsky defeated the Swedes in a battle on Chudskoye Lake in 1242. At this time Russia was not a unified country and various regions were vassal states. Political and military leaders, (the two adjectives never strayed very far apart) were required to pay taxes to their Tatar lords and ask them permission to rule their own provinces. After his father died, Prince Nevsky, successor to his father’s throne and title, spent three years at Buta Khan’s court, trying to obtain the necessary permission to rule the Novgorod region. Buta Khan, who was impressed with Nevsky’s learning and refusal to worship pagan gods, finally granted his permission. However, on the return homeward voyage, Nevsky fell ill near Nizhny Novgorod and died quietly on November 14, 1263.

Nizhny Novgorod Molitovsky Bridge

But at the funeral, the Prince performed his first miracle. While the prayer was read, a hand of the deceased unclasped to take the roll on which the prayer was written. And it was not until Metropolitan Cyril, who was reading the burial service, put the roll into his hand, that it clasped again. His relics are now stored in the Holy Trinity Cathedral at the lavra.