Deborah's travels: Sitka

Sitka was the capital of Russian America. They had a policy that all officers must be married to come here, because they were setting up a colony. So there is the grave of a Russian princess here - the wife of the last Russian governor - but she died well after the handover, so they must have decided to stay.

The first Russian church was next to the wall of the fort, with one door inside the fort for the whites, and a door on the outside for the Tlingits. The first bishop (Bishop Innocent) was canonised, as was Father Yakov Netsvetov who was an Inuit, and is buried here.

This was near one of the blockhouses of the fort, a replica of a different blockhouse was built where it was.

There is the Russian Orthadox cathedral from 1844 and the first Lutheran church on the west coast (Finnish as some officer's wives were Lutherans from Finland) 1843, but both were destroyed by fire and rebuilt. According to the Tlingit woman I met, the artifacts were saved by Tlingits forming a human chain on the night of the fire.

There is also a Russian Orthodox cemetery. It is still used today, and is a series of groups of grave sites in the forest.

The handover of Alaska occurred here, so it is the first site where the American flag was flown, and although it was no longer the capital, was the first site where the American flag with 49 stars was flown by some renegade soldiers. All of these were at the top of castle hill. I went to the top of Castle Hill, but it isn't an obvious landmark now. The model of the town at the time of the fort shows it much better.

I visited the third museum today (the first was yesterday, and the second is undergoing major refurbishment), and it was extremely good. It is mainly a collection of First Nations artifacts from the first years of the 1900s, but unlike other collectors, Sheldon Jackson identified the peoples from whom items came. There were a couple of bows and arrows.