Market Friday at the Gostiny Dvor department store

The weather has been unpleasant. That's if I express my impressions of the weather in a stern and polite way. It was lousy weather. Just the kind where even dogs are in a hurry to get home from their walk as quickly as possible. It was damp, dusky, windy. From time to time a fine rain began to fall from the sky, mixed with prickly snowflakes.

The situation was aggravated by the fact that I had dressed too lightly in the morning, based only on the thermometer outside the window and not on the whole weather situation in the complex. Fresh air came with an icy wind on this day, and no other way. I was ready to give up the walk and go back home, under the protection of the walls, but then an alternative idea came into my head: why not take a walk in the Gostiny Dvor?

Gostiny Dvor is one of the oldest department stores in the city. The building of the Gostiny Dvor was built in the late XVIII century by architect Jean Baptiste Vallin-Delamotte. Subsequently, the building was partially rebuilt and completed several times, but the general appearance of the shopping area has changed little in the process of these rebuildings.

Gostiny Dvor is a quadrangle of irregular shape, the first and second floors of the building are occupied by stores. On the street side there is an open gallery. The open gallery of the first floor is quite a lively place, there are always a lot of passers-by. The second floor gallery is usually not crowded.

I started my walk around Gostiny Dvor from the central entrance to the department store. Santa Claus in a red coat with a sack of presents in his hands is a symbol of the approaching holidays. Another recognizable holiday symbol is a poster of The Nutcracker, the traditional New Year's Eve performance. I went up to the second floor, walked along a row of stores selling branded clothes, and came to the open gallery of the second floor.

The Gostiny Dvor gallery overlooks the neighboring houses, most of which were also built specifically for commercial purposes. Now these small spaces house coffee shops, bars, small stores, pharmacies, art stores and other retail establishments.

For a while my walk was quite pleasant, the vaults of the gallery protected me from the light rain and the wall of the building from the wind. But after another turn, I came to a windy area, and again began to look for protection from the weather inside the building. I was in for a surprise: it turned out that several sales rooms had been handed over to the literary museum "XX century", and a museum exposition had been set up in them.

At the next corner I turned towards the subway station. I wasn't going to go down into the subway, but I wanted to look at the stained glass window above the escalators. It commemorates the events of July 1917. It is the oldest stained glass window of the St. Petersburg subway, it was created in 1977 by the artist Alexander Korolev. Subsequently, stained glass windows decorated the lobbies of many stations, but this was the first.

At this point my walk through the department store is coming to an end. I have only a few tens of meters to go to complete my circular journey through the shopping rows and galleries of Gostiny Dvor.