I’m not a big museums fan. I’m not a high art or culture sort of person. At the risk of sounding like a brat, I’ve been to the Louvre, I’ve been to the Hermitage before. It’s not my thing.
But in St Petersburg, I felt like I really should make the effort to go to the Hermitage. It’s the reason people go to this city. The palaces are nice and the city’s pretty – it was built to be the Imperial capital. It’s not a place that’s grown over the centuries like Moscow. And because the Imperial family was so very imperial, every brother and cousin and nearly-relation was also imperial and therefore they all had their own palaces. And people do come to St Petersburg because it’s a beautiful city with literally more palaces than they know what to do with. But they come to see the Hermitage.
The Hermitage is a world class museum. It’s huge. They say you could spend a year there if you only gave thirty seconds to each exhibit. It’s housed in five palaces – the Winter Palace, the New, Old and Small Hermitages and the Hermitage Theatre. The place was established by Catherine the Great, who as well as being the most noted Tsarina in Imperial history, was a great art collector. So great that the Hermitage started as just one palace and by the time Nikolai II was making a point of not living there, it must have been just too much to even imagine living in.
First up: how to get in. I’d expected to see a massive queue at a museum of this quality but there wasn’t one. The entrance on the Embankment has a queue but it was for tour groups only. The person-on-their-own entrance is through the obvious entrance on Palace Square. You can buy tickets from the machines in the courtyard behind or at the desk – here’s that queue!
Once you’ve got a ticket, you queue right across the lobby to get into the museum. There’s a cloakroom but whatever you leave here stays here until the end. There’s a rolling X-ray machine to dump your stuff in and a sign saying no liquids, much to my rage. You want me to spend a day here without a bottle of sugary liquid to help keep me conscious? I’d filled a bottle with leftover Coke that very morning, so as to get it drunk before I went to the airport tomorrow and I was furious at having to abandon it, especially once I got to the other side and saw how many people hadn’t. A litre of orange juice still in its carton! So naturally I did what they want. I went to the little lounge-cafe and bought a new drink to carry around plus a croissant for second breakfast.
I thought my favourite bit would be the Egyptian room downstairs. Year Four History instilled quite a liking for Ancient Egypt in me. But it wasn’t very exciting.
Upstairs, up the Jordan Staircase, all decorated in Imperial style and more impressive if you didn’t have to dodge a selfie-taking tourist on every single step, was where the good stuff was. The upstairs of the Winter Palace, the first building in this massive complex, was mostly Imperial state rooms, left to look Imperial. I didn’t really wake up to that until I walked into the Gold Room. I still don’t know if it’s part of the Gold Rooms that you’re supposed to have a special ticket for. No way to keep out people who don’t, so I suspect not. On the other hand, it was so gold. When I have a house, I’m having a gold living room. It was monumentally gold and it startled me into taking an interest in the state rooms.
The jewel of these is the Malachite Room. I’ve mentioned before that Russia likes malachite. I wish I could tell you that the room was malachite from floor to ceiling like the Gold Room but it wasn’t. It had malachite pillars and oversized vases and a fireplace and it was unmistakably a malachite room but I’d have liked to see the room done just a little more. This is the room where the Provisional Government held its last meeting before the October Revolution – they were arrested that night in the adjoining malachite-free dining room.
Other rooms of note were the two red and gold throne rooms, the small one and the big hall. I am a Dwarf; I love rocks and the underground and the more gold on view, the more I like it. This too would fit in my future house.
I made a point of heading away from the state rooms, my favourite part, into the other Hermitages, although it’s such a labyrinth it can be very difficult to tell you’re in a different building. There’s some fine art here – there’s stuff by Da Vinci and Picasso and Caravaggio and Michaelangelo – a lot of big names. I admit, I marched through most of these going “Yep, fine, done, seen it, not that good, done, seen it, urgh, yep, yep, seen” with no real interest. I’m a philistine. I’m sorry. What I do seem to quite enjoy is architecture and ceilings and fireplaces and of course, gold.
They’re right, there’s so much in this place. If you have more appreciation for art than me, I imagine you could spend years here. Even I managed four or five hours before tired feet won out over art and culture.
The army were up to something in Palace Square when I went out. Small chunks, six or twelve men per group, were marching around in assorted different uniforms. One pair appeared to be practicing the Correct Funny Walks Russian march and as I departed the square, a small military band were taking their time setting up presumably to do something similar. It’s always worth spending some time in Palace Square, I think.
Was this my fourth blog post on St Petersburg? I get confused about what order they’re going to go up in but this was the last thing I did in St Petersburg and it seems reasonable that the next Russia blog will be on “how to get into an apartment in Murmansk”. See you in the north.