St. Petersburg: Day 5, The State Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Ahhh, the Hermitage.  The most essential destination in St. Petersburg.  This palace-turned-museum is a must see in Piter.  (What, am I writing for a travel company now??)  It houses the art collection of the Tsars and is one of the largest collections in the world.  According to Fodor’s travel guide to Moscow and St. Petersburg, there are so many things in the Hermitage, that if you spent one minute on each item there, you would be there for several years.  We were there for several hours, and I just found myself walking from room to room with my head on a swivel.  Long story short, I saw a lot of gorgeously decorated rooms, more chandeliers than I could count (actually, that’s a lie, because I can count pretty high in English and now in Russian….and up to twenty in Czech, although that wouldn’t have gotten me very far.  Maybe the first two or three rooms.  But still, there were a lot of big fancy lighting devices hanging from the ceilings.), and enough naked/almost naked people depicted in artwork to last me a very very long time!

So before going inside the museum, I knew that it was big.  We had been to the square a few times while we were walking around, and we could clearly see that it was an enormous building.  But it didn’t really settle in until I was walking around inside.  Sasha and I split up.  At first it wasn’t on purpose, but it was better that way because we could each go at our own pace.  So I set off, map in hand, to navigate both the ridiculous masses of people and rooms.  I walked, and I walked, and I looked at art, and I walked some more.  And then I realized that what I was looking at looked familiar.  I looked at the map and kept walking and seeing more things that I remembered.  I think that I saw the section on Russian culture and the exhibit on Palace Interiors probably three times before I asked for directions (successfully. Woot!).  The smart thing to do would have been to mark on the map every room that I walked through so that I would know what I had already seen, but that only occurred to me half way through.  But about this, I am not complaining!  Each time around, I noticed something new in just about every room, which was great.  And once I found my way out of the Russian culture section, I was able to see some works of art from other parts of the world as well, including works from Picasso and Matisse.  (How do you like how I’m pretending that I know about art work?  I actually don’t.  But I was able to read the exhibits, which helped.)

Roofs and Cathedral in Rouen. 1908.
Othon Friesz
My favorite painting in the Hermitage.

There was one thing that I read about in the tour book while on the train that I looked for when we got to the Hermitage and that was the Peacock Clock.  This was a clock made for Catherine the Great in England in 1781, and it still works up to this date, although they have stopped winding it in an effort to preserve the mechanism.  When it chimes, “the peacock spreads its wings and turns in a circle, the rooster crows, and the owl opens and closes its eyes” (thank you Foders, once again).  Since they no longer wind the clock, we were unable to see the little show, but it was still a beautiful piece of work.

The Peacock Clock

All in all, the Hermitage was great!  It was a lot to process, though, so I am not going to write as much about it as I have written about other things.  And I also feel that there should be a little disclaimer to go along with this post.  I am exhausted (but in a good, we saw so many interesting things on vacation, kind of way), and so this post may be slightly silly in parts.  Haha  But still….on to Moscow tomorrow to finish off the week!!