Russian revelation: Suzdal's picture-postcard B&B

A pretty, family-run B&B in a historic cathedral city makes a refreshing change from Russia's usual grim concrete hotelsThe words "bed & breakfast" and "Russia" have not often been seen in the same sentence. In Soviet times, foreign tourists were usually holed up with their Pravda-spouting guides in soulless hotels of multi-storey concrete. And while today's consumerist, capitalist Moscow has gone in for five-star overkill, it has precious little for the low-budget traveller.So finding a picture-postcard guesthouse in the historic cathedral city of Suzdal felt like both a triumph and a novelty. My partner and I, due to spend a hectic 10 days in Moscow, fancied a quiet getaway, too. And we found it on a website listing all manner of lodgings (including vintage Soviet concrete). We cut out the agency and emailed the guesthouse direct.After a three-hour train journey east from Moscow to Vladimir, and a 45-minute bus ride north to Suzdal, we were met by Irina and Sergey Zakharov, a friendly couple who speak little English but have welcomed guests from as far afield as Germany and Hong Kong. Their house looked the epitome of the Russian idyll: a wooden exterior painted blue, green and yellow, windows framed by carvings, chickens clucking in the yard. Sergey built the house himself in the 1980s, he told us, but it adheres strictly to a style unchanged since the 1800s.Inside, admittedly, it was less picturesque and more like a Soviet apartment. Our twin-bed room, with its long sofa and cabinet of fussy china, must normally have been the living room. Across the hallway was a spotless modern shower room. In the kitchen, guests gathered cosily at the table for a breakfast of tea, toast with jam or cheese and, on request, porridge and homemade blinis. (Irina's pancakes were surpassed, however, by those at the cafe a few doors along the street; freshly made by a stern-looking babushka, I think they were the best I've ever tasted.)From the potholed lane outside, we glimpsed a fairytale vision of Russia: the onion domes of a church hovered tantalisingly above the rooftops, and at every turn were wooden houses, tsarist edifices of crumbling stone and, yes, more onion domes. All this, huddled along the banks of the slow-moving Kamenka river.Medieval Suzdal was capital of a principality and one of Russia's biggest religious centres. In the Soviet era, more than 20 of its churches and monasteries were demolished ? although a dozen or so were spared in order to preserve the town as an open-air museum. No wonder it served as the film set for Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 medieval epic Andrei Rublev.At Suzdal's northern edge is the imposing Yevfimievsky monastery, containing museums, a cathedral, an 18th-century former prison and a tower of bells that peal for 15 minutes at 11am each day. The nearby Convent of the Intercession was once used as a dumping ground for the unwanted wives of tsars, and further south is Suzdal's own Kremlin, or fortress. From here, you can cross the river to the open-air Museum of Wooden Architecture, a collection of buildings salvaged from nearby villages.The town has just one concrete eyesore, and a Lenin statue still stands in front of it. Otherwise there's not a tower block or factory in sight, just lanes of storybook wooden houses. It's a place that conjures fantasies of the fabled Russian hospitality; a place to imagine carpeted in snow as you take shelter with homemade blinis and tea brewed from a samovar. Indeed, when it came to paying our bill, maybe ? just maybe ? it was that fabled hospitality that made Sergey seem so uncomfortable about taking our money.? The Zakharovs' guesthouse is at 1ya Ulitsa Krasnoarmeyskaya 15, +7 960 734 2073, email: zakharova-irina@yandex.ru (Irina knows enough English to email but not to converse). Doubles from about �35 B&B. For information on Russian visas, see ru.vfsglobal.co.uk. One useful agency is intelservice.ru. Trains from Moscow to Vladimir take around three hours (russiantrains.com). From there, buses to Suzdal take 45 minutes, taxis 30 minutes. PACK UP YOUR ROUBLES: MORE RUSSIAN B&BSRussiaBed and breakfastsBudget travelEuropeAsiaguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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