Smolny Cathedral Winter Dusk Countdown Timer

The blue is not a filter. Smolny is painted that colour, or it was, a hundred and eighty years ago, and every repaint since has been a slightly different argument about which blue. In this light, that deep January evening blue that comes down over the city and then stays for hours, the walls and the sky almost match. The cathedral stops looking like a building and starts looking like something carved out of the air. Snow was packed hard on the ground. Cars queued along the kerb with their lights on, exhaust going straight up in the cold. A man in a dark coat crossed in front of me at exactly the wrong moment and I let him, because he had somewhere to be. Rastrelli designed this. He also did the Winter Palace, and if you know that building you can see the same hand here. The same love of excess, the same blue, the same refusal to leave a surface alone. It was meant to be the centre of a whole complex. That never happened. The money ran out, which is why it stands here by itself in the snow, enormous and half finished and completely beautiful.