A Cruise Continued.

I'm splitting this up to make more room for pictures.  Below, another one from the hilltop park.  The river shown here is the Oka, which a few meters to the right would have joined with the larger Volga River.  

And above, a newly renovated Orthodox church near the harbor, originally built by the Stroganov family.  Until about thirty years ago, these pictures might have been illicit goods-- Nizhny was a "closed city" for most of the Soviet period, where foreigners were not permitted. Even selling street maps was outlawed until the mid-seventies, purportedly to protect the military research facilities then located there.  The city wasn't officially opened until after the fall of the Soviet Union.