The Hermitage

Well today we spent all day in the Hermitage museum. The line was at least an hour long but luckily we pre purchased our tickets online and were able to walk right in. This museum is huge! We made a start on the ground floor and worked our way up to the 3rd floor by the end of the day. We basically started at 11:00am and finished at 6:00pm with 2 - 15 minute breaks to get a snack and drink. The collection ranges from Egyptian to modern art. The museum consists of several "palaces" that were built next door to each other. Catherine the great was the art collector and built several buildings just to house her collection. I kept thinking how can one person acquire this much art! It's not even all on display. I've heard other people say the Hermitage makes Versailles look like a commoners house and that the Tsar's spent way more money on their palaces, it was true, many of the rooms were covered in gold leaf, wood carvings all over the ceilings, wood floors with intricate patterns and just so many rooms! The art alone inside each room is worth millions and millions.

Chris here. OK. A couple of observations - It's light enough out still, to take pictures and it's now 11:30 at night,
every third person on the street is carrying and drinking an alcoholic beverage, regardless of age, sidewalk, street, same difference, your not safe regardless of which one your one, they drive like maniacs, decroded doesn't describe the state of the city, it's decrodeder then decroded. I just got back from a long, meandering walk through what a guidebook called "Beauty in decay". It took me on a stroll down streets showing some of the glory and beauty of the city lost to years of communism, plaster and bricks falling off in heaps and a layer of soot and dirt so thick you could sow seeds in it. St. Petersburg is actually younger, by over 50 years, then New York, but it looks like it was built overnight then abandoned. It's amazing the sheer number of absolutley glorious buildings 99% of which are as described above - decroded, to quote Napoleon Dynamite. In fact the hotel we're staying in is a five star top of the line establishment and right across the street is a building that is completely falling apart. It's quite sad in reality to see things like palaces of Dukes, Dutchesses and other royals and members of high society that are in deplorable states of disrepair or outright abandonment. The Hermitage itself is in less than stellar conditions in many areas. Parts of it rival all the best of Europe in both beauty and preservation and not ten steps later you are in a hallway with restrooms that feel and smell as though they haven't been cleaned in years. Everything is either beautiful or groadie. It's all or nothing.





Actually, my mind has wandered back many times during the day to the idea that this is what communism wrought. Near complete and utter destruction. I think of France having nuked it's monarch in 1790 whatever then moving into, for lack of a better description, a capitalist society. And, a hundred years later they have a modern society with standard levels of decay. But also certainly with highly cared for and preserved monuments to their history. Here the Bolsheviks tossed out the Russian monarchy and resorted to communism and 60 years later you have an entire neoclassical city in need of complete rescue. I'm not sure all the billionaires in the world could contribute money enough to restore this city. It seems like there's just no pride here. Trash and litter abound. Everything is just dirty. There's no grass to mow anywhere. Just weeds.

But still, there something magical about this place. A sense of "what if?" I think if every building in a two mile radius of the Hermitage could be restored to its former glory this city would outshine all others. In spite of the near architectural sameness of the buildings, due to the city in essence being constructed in about 100 years, there is amazing potential in each one. The network of canals winding through the streets lend a Venetian feel to countless neighborhoods.

But, enough about all that.

So, we went to the Hermitage today as I'm sure Anneka mentioned at the beginning of this blog.

Indescribable.

How do you begin to put words to a palace so large you literally get lost in it? How do you wrap your mind around what one guidebook said about the collection - so big that if you glanced at each piece for a mere three seconds it would take eleven years to see the whole of it? I'd mentioned above that there are many beautiful rooms with a couple of rather run down ones interspersed within. Some rooms where gilt from the baseboards to the bellybutton in the ceiling where the chandelier hangs from. The art is overwhelming. I've never seen more Rembrandts in one place in my life. I overheard a guide say they have the second largest collection of Rembrandts in the world. They have a huge collection of Matisses and the largest urn I've ever walked under! It was like seven feet tall and some 10 to 12 feet wide at the rim and weighs 19 tons! One nasty part of the day is they were refinishing a very large parquet floor, as best we can tell, in one of the rooms and they were using a material that smelled just like they were smearing deisel fuel all over. So at times and in places the museum stunk to high heaven. There was a mosaic table about three feet in diamter made of mosaic peices about half the size of your average pinky finger nail clipping. Must have been a million or more little pieces to make up that table.




When you see me next, ask me about the Hermitage, there was too much to see to cover in simple words in this blog. Plus I'm exhausted and want to go to bed.

I'm actually having a hard time writing right now since I'm so tired. More tomorrow. We're off to Peterhof for the better part of the day and I'd like to go back to the Hermitage for another hour or so just to soak it all in. I'm not likely to ever make it back here again for the rest of my life so I need to fill the mind up with images...