This weekend millions of Russians will celebrate the joyous holiday of Easter. That’s right, Easter! See, Russia and other Christian Orthodox countries celebrate it on a different day - this time a whole week after everyone else. And don’t worry, you don’t have to be religious: for many it’s just a reason to have fun, meet with friends and relatives and feast on food.
Which brings us to our first event, the Easter Festival at Russkie Samotsvety factory (Carl Fabergé Sq. 8, April 6-22). The jewelry factory will host an exhibition of luxurious bejeweled Easter eggs and religious portraits. Among the key attractions are two holographic realistic copies of world-famous Fabergé eggs - made by optical scientists from ITMO University!
Another great Easter experience is the Pleasure Foods Fair (Eurasia Expo Center, Kantemirovskaya St. 26, April 4-8), where food producers from many regions of the country - farmers, bakers, butchers, fishermen and many others - will come together for an Easter-themed fair. This is a great destination for all the food lovers out there, especially since you’ll get to try the many delicious Russian Easter treats we told you about in yesterday’s article, like paskha, kulichi and others. By the way, the St. Petersburg Metro will operate all night long between April 7 and 8!
Obviously, you’ll need something to wash all those sweet treats down - and what’s better than a cup of some damn good coffee? For Coffee Day (ARTPLAY Design Center, Krasnogvardeyskaya Sq. 3, April 7) Baristas and coffee enthusiasts will brew - and consume - countless gallons of coffee of many kinds, from simple no-nonsense black to extravagant spiced varieties. Members of St. Petersburg’s foodsharing movement, Mexican food joints and vegan bakers will provide a diverse range of foods.
In this week’s art events, you can visit the Other Dimension: Surrealism in Graphics and Sculpture exhibition at Arts Square Gallery (Italianskaya St. 5, ends on May 31), featuring works by Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, and others. Meanwhile, the ART-BANK exhibition space will host Magic of the Carnival (Nevsky 62, ends on April 29), an exhibition of 57 Venetian carnival masks, made by hands of Venetian craftsmen.
And if you’re more interested in learning about Russian art, the Erarta Museum will host Hopeless Painters (29th Liniya V.O., 2, ends on April 14), an exhibition of paintings by the Leningrad/St. Petersburg-based art group of the same name. At the State Russian Museum’s Marble Palace branch, the In Search of a Сontemporary Style exhibition is a look at art made by Leningrad artists in mid 1950-s to mid 1960-s during the so-called “Khrushchev Thaw”. Finally, the Engineering house at the Peter and Paul Fortress is currently host to an exhibition on Soviet-era street decorations used to celebrate the anniversaries of the Great Russian Revolution in the period between 1917 and 1987. The exhibition will close on November 6, so you’ve got plenty of time to make your way there.
It’s a great weekend for movie and theater buffs, too. Steven Spielberg’s light-hearted nostalgia-trip blockbuster Ready Player One just opened last week to positive reviews; fans of less cheerful cinema will appreciate Lynne Ramsay’s thriller You Were Never Really Here starring a brooding, murderous Joaquin Phoenix, as well as Steven Soderbergh’s experimental horror Unsane, shot entirely using the director’s iPhone 7. As for theatre, this Sunday you can see a National Theatre Live screening of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role.
