VFYW: Cheers To "The Sea's Fire"!

For contest #456, our resident mixologist creates a very topical — and aspirational — drink.

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

From one of the winners of last week’s contest:

A cheer for the VFYW’s inept. If a 95-year-old clueless sleuth can win this contest, anyone can. All one needs to do is see a few recognizable scenes and wait for a window from one’s hometown. Pose one’s attractive wife — young enough not to require an RMD [Required Minimum Distribution] — in the picture and fall into some luck.

I will take the VFYW book, since I’m planning to be a Weekly Dish subscriber until I’m no longer able.

He added, “We really enjoyed the write-up about Bend.” From the other co-winner of that contest:

I would like the two free years of the Dish — thank you very much. I’ve had fun with the VFYW, and I’m impressed with your sleuths.

Big ditto. Here’s a followup from the CO/NJ super-sleuth:

As I mentioned last week, my daughter was in Bend at the time of the contest, skiing at the US Collegiate Ski Association National Championships with her Colgate University teammates, at Mt. Bachelor. I thought I would pass along a photo of the team, at the race:

On to this week’s view, and a followup for our Kandy contest, here’s the super-sleuth in Chicagoland:

So either you or a substance altered how these emails are delivered recently, since the image I downloaded on my phone for the recent Sri Lankan view was much blurrier than what was available via the app — such that I could not make heads or tails of what turned out to be one of the key clues for others sleuths. Here’s the side-by-side:

This made me doubly sad because I believe it was the first Sri Lanka view since the one I won many moons ago (contest #204).

So this week I was prepared with the app and ready to focus on the most minute of details in this new view … only for the key clue to be the giant freaking cathedral that only Mr Magoo could miss! Well, I am a fan of cathedrals, so this was right up my alley.

Our previous winner in Tewksbury runs through other clues:

A tough a challenge as it gets: construction, street-view pictures from a variety of years (none of which offers a complete view of the various buildings in the neighborhood — see aforementioned construction), billboards relocating from year to year, poor municipal maintenance of grass and trees blocking sight-lines … you name it. And somehow the remoteness of [city redacted] just makes it all seem more impenetrable.

Here’s the super-sleuth in Louisville:

Toughie this week. The Google street view is so old that I’m not even going to try to guess a building or a window. What can I say, I’m a slave to technology, unlike the real super-sleuths. The Eastern Orthodox church at the far right was the only clue I could work on, and for all I know, there may be 100 other similar-looking churches around the world, and the view might as well be in New Jersey.

A long-time sleuth exclaims, “How do your readers wind up in these places, Chris?!” From the UWS super-sleuth:

Well, this one was fun! A somewhat tricky-to-find cathedral. A building that comes and goes on Google Street View. A teeny tiny Dusty that I didn’t even notice until I was assembling my answer. This felt like just the right combination of challenging and doable.

My husband saw Andrew’s email first and told me that this week’s View was in black & white. But no, it’s just THAT DREARY.

Brightening things up is the super-sleuth in San Mateo:

Although the cathedral occupies just a fraction of the pixels in the VFYW’s broader composition, it serves as the scene’s dramatic focal point, majestically perched on a bluff overlooking a river. Its prominence draws our gaze away from the chaotic sprawl of construction below. And instead of settling for the partial side view in the VFYW, let us confront the cathedral head-on and Reimagine it — in all its magnificent entirety:

The super-sleuth in Sagaponack also gets into the Reimagined game:

Trippy. Narrowing down the countries is our super-sleuth in Vancouver, WA:

This was an interesting contest view. The vibe was Eastern European due to the cleverly placed Orthodox Cathedral in the background edge of the view. Maybe Russia or Ukraine? That would be very topical.

Going with the latter country is a sleuth who lists the “Best Clues”:

Church with Eastern Orthodox architecture. Slightly underdeveloped. Architecture of the buildings. Cold and wet. Chaotic parking. Russian cities have wider roads. River.

Is it Dnipro, Ukraine?

Nope, but good guess. From the Burner super-sleuth:

I thought this week’s window would be an easy one — just search “waterfront Orthodox church.” But definitely not the case. I couldn’t verify any of the visual cues and finally gave up. Odessa, Ukraine??

That’s what the wine geek in SF initially thought:

On first glance, I had absolutely zero idea where we could possibly be, except that it looked grey and drab and colorless and cold. Sheez. I saw that the beagle was attempting to cover up a sign in Cyrillic and I thought “we are in Odessa.” But that didn’t make any sense for a number of reasons — new construction? holiday in Odessa? business in Odessa? Okay, if not Odessa, then where else do they use the Cyrillic alphabet? No help there.

Finally, I noticed the church/cathedral on the right edge of the photograph. Onion domes! Gold! White!

I hope I’m not the only one to think this contest was fairly challenging. Super gargantuan grandmasters like Chini probably didn’t think so, but I was confounded at almost every turn and frequently thought I was not up to the task and should just turn in my sleuthing badge.

San Mateo wonders, “Is the beagle in the VFYW obscuring a company sign?”

Yep. Identifying the company is our super-sleuth “way out west”:

I see that Dusty is covering up a sign for “Fight and Functional Club Academy”:

Someone should let them know that with this advertisement, they have broken the first two rules of Fight Club:

Rule 1: You do not talk about Fight Club.

Rule 2: You do NOT talk about Fight Club.

The super-sleuth in DC reveals the front of that fight club:

A sleuth “frustrated in Alexandria, VA” names the right country:

Ooof ... I really don’t know. I thought that finding a distinctive church next to a pretty substantial body of water wouldn’t be that hard, but after scrolling through pictures of lots of white Orthodox churches topped by gold onion domes in cold climates, I’m at a loss.

What's interesting to me is how large that church is and how old it appears, but the area around it doesn’t look historic at all. Nearly all the large churches I looked at online look like they are in sections of cities that are at least several hundred years old.

I would assume the location is Russia, except that I can’t imagine many of your readers are traveling there right now — though perhaps you have some Russia-based readers. I looked at various larger Russian cities but couldn’t find anything. I looked at the Baltic states, but after looking at their churches I learned that they more often resemble Nordic churches — more Lutheran and Catholic — which makes sense based on their location. I also looked at the Black Sea and Siberia, but nothing came up.

I can’t find it, but it’s not for lack of trying. I’ll take a stab at St. Petersburg, Russia.

The A2 Team in Ann Arbor gets close to the right region in Russia:

Initially we thought we’d have to go through a reference work of historical Russian church architecture to find this church, since it was clearly not one of the famous locations — like Tver' or Nizhnii Novgorod, let alone St. Petersburg or Moscow. Interestingly, Google searches regularly bring up images of the Pecherskaya Lavra in Kyiv, which nobody should call Russian anymore.

A closer look, however, showed that our church is more modern, which suggests a location outside of the old Rus' or Muscovy; and a search for a church in Siberia brought up a match pretty quickly.

Here’s the beginning of the entry from Berkeley:

With the Cyrillic signage and that very tall Eastern Orthodox house of worship at the right edge, it was pretty obvious what countries were generally worth considering. But I wasted way too much time wandering around in Bulgaria because I really really didn’t want the window to be in Russia. (But then I also never entertained the possibility that the body of water in the photo could be a river. It just looked too wide not to be a bay. What the hell do I know?)

Fortunately it didn’t take long to eliminate all the likely coastal spots in Bulgaria, which seemed to leave the vastness of Russia as the only reasonable alternative. But all my searches for images of Orthodox churches or cathedrals in Russia just kept turning up the same suspects, not one of which was the cathedral in the photo. Google, Qwant, DuckDuckGo, even Bing — nothing.

Opting for a Russian search engine was the super-sleuth in Sydney:

After some grinding, I realised Google Maps is massively out of date in Russia, so I switch to Yandex maps, Russia’s equivalent. That made a big difference (perhaps at the cost of Vladamir Putin now accessing my computer, but if the KGB can help me with the VFYW, I’m ok with that).

The super-sleuth in San Fran names the right river in view:

Cyrillic letters, an Orthodox Church, and a more European feel mean that we are probably in Russia or Ukraine this week. The water looks more likely to be a big river, so I start looking at the big cities on the Volga and Dnieper, but nothing looks quite right. After a bit more searching, I realize we are all the way on the other side of Russia on the Amur.

Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome, teases the right city:

Once again, as in contest #391, we find ourselves near what I called “an uncomfortable border.” The border here is farther away than in Narva: about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles); but it’s just as uncomfortable.

On one side — the side from which this week’s photo was taken — you have the Far Eastern Federal District, with an area of 6,952,555 km² and a population of 7,975,762 (in 2021); on the other side, you have a region with an area of 791,826 km² and a population of 98,514,948. All border issues — and there were many — were settled in 2004, yes; but one of the countries has a tradition of regretting its former, larger borders; and the other (the weaker one) has just set a precedent for breaking treaties and invading a neighboring country.

Our Russian-American super-sleuth gets the honors of revealing the right city:

I’ve been taking a break from active participation in the contest, but I continue reading the VFYW submissions every week. Of course I had to participate this week, obviously! I wonder who the submitter is; I may know this person! (spooky)