94. The Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Center
The Hermitage Museum has a huge collection of artwork that was amassed over three centuries. The collection is much too big to store in the Winter Palace, or any of the other Hermitage museum buildings in the city center. Like many large institutions, the Hermitage built an off-site storage facility for its objects not currently on display (which typically comprise between 90% and almost the entirety of a museum's collections, depending on the institution).
The Hermitage's storage facility is located in the northwestern part of the city, four stops north of the city center on the Metro line #5 (violet), and two blocks east of the Staraya Derevnya Metro station. Its location - far removed from any other tourist destinations - makes it a hidden gem in the city. Most tourists to St. Petersburg have no idea that this place exists, or that it's possible to visit it. In fact, it turns out to be one of the more interesting of the six Hermitage museums, and not just for people whose first career was in museums.
The Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Center includes open storage (and I assume quite a bit of closed storage), a conservation center, and a library. The complex includes four or five large buildings, with the largest still under construction. The only way to see the open storage areas are via a guided tour for a modest fee (charged even to Friends of the Hermitage). Although our tour guide spoke fluent English, there were four or five Russians in our group so the tour was conducted entirely in Russian. For two hours! I understood a fair amount - perhaps 10-15% of what our guide said - enough to pick up some interesting information about most of the art. I did my best to translate some of it for my wife.
The open storage was a bit different than I've seen at other museums in the United States. Much of the art was positioned in such a way as to provide good viewing angles for tour groups (for example, an 18th century field tent was set up over a clear glass support, so we could walk inside it without any risk of contact with the delicate fabric). The facility was designed as a museum not only of storage techniques but also of the art itself. A more common open storage design at other museums is a traditional storage area that simply has a window that visitors can peer through into the room, with no particular effort to line up more than a few objects for easy viewing.
Our tour started in a room with medieval religious art, including some frescoes that had been entirely transplanted to the walls here. We then moved into the painting room that housed works from the 17th-19th centuries, saw several of the aforementioned field tents that had been gifted to various Russian rulers, and ended up in a room with a few dozen costumes and hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of antique furniture. The final area was a large room that housed 10 or 15 carriages. The highlight here was the Imperial carriage that was used to carry Alexandra Feodorovna to her coronation in Moscow in 1896. A replica of this carriage is the surprise inside the most famous Faberge creation, the Coronation Egg. I saw this egg a few months ago at the Faberge Museum near my apartment (and also recently re-watched the movie Ocean's Twelve in which the egg plays a key part). Photography was not allowed inside the center, but I did take pictures of the interesting architecture.
The first picture below is a poster in the center's lobby that shows the coronation carriage on display inside, and the second is the model of the carriage from the Coronation Egg at the Faberge Museum:
The Hermitage's storage facility is located in the northwestern part of the city, four stops north of the city center on the Metro line #5 (violet), and two blocks east of the Staraya Derevnya Metro station. Its location - far removed from any other tourist destinations - makes it a hidden gem in the city. Most tourists to St. Petersburg have no idea that this place exists, or that it's possible to visit it. In fact, it turns out to be one of the more interesting of the six Hermitage museums, and not just for people whose first career was in museums.
The Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Center includes open storage (and I assume quite a bit of closed storage), a conservation center, and a library. The complex includes four or five large buildings, with the largest still under construction. The only way to see the open storage areas are via a guided tour for a modest fee (charged even to Friends of the Hermitage). Although our tour guide spoke fluent English, there were four or five Russians in our group so the tour was conducted entirely in Russian. For two hours! I understood a fair amount - perhaps 10-15% of what our guide said - enough to pick up some interesting information about most of the art. I did my best to translate some of it for my wife.
The open storage was a bit different than I've seen at other museums in the United States. Much of the art was positioned in such a way as to provide good viewing angles for tour groups (for example, an 18th century field tent was set up over a clear glass support, so we could walk inside it without any risk of contact with the delicate fabric). The facility was designed as a museum not only of storage techniques but also of the art itself. A more common open storage design at other museums is a traditional storage area that simply has a window that visitors can peer through into the room, with no particular effort to line up more than a few objects for easy viewing.
Our tour started in a room with medieval religious art, including some frescoes that had been entirely transplanted to the walls here. We then moved into the painting room that housed works from the 17th-19th centuries, saw several of the aforementioned field tents that had been gifted to various Russian rulers, and ended up in a room with a few dozen costumes and hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of antique furniture. The final area was a large room that housed 10 or 15 carriages. The highlight here was the Imperial carriage that was used to carry Alexandra Feodorovna to her coronation in Moscow in 1896. A replica of this carriage is the surprise inside the most famous Faberge creation, the Coronation Egg. I saw this egg a few months ago at the Faberge Museum near my apartment (and also recently re-watched the movie Ocean's Twelve in which the egg plays a key part). Photography was not allowed inside the center, but I did take pictures of the interesting architecture.
The first picture below is a poster in the center's lobby that shows the coronation carriage on display inside, and the second is the model of the carriage from the Coronation Egg at the Faberge Museum:
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