St Pertersburg

The Hermitage

Wed 26 May

Last night we lingered over dinner and then went out on deck to watch the sunset over Lake Lodoga which has an area of 18,000 sq km and a depth of 230m. It was 10:55 when the sun finally dipped below the horizon and when Ann looked out of the cabin window at 2:30 am it was already light. This northern part of Europe is rapidly approaching the period “White Nights” when it never gets dark. In winter they only have six hours of daylight a day.

We awoke this morning to find the boat was already moored the in St Petersburg and to be greeted with heavy rain. Saint Petersburg is located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city has also been known as Petrograd, 1914–1924 and Leningrad, 1924–1991. The city is sometimes referred to in Russia as the Northern Capital. Over its history it has also been referred to as "the Venice of the north, with 101 islands and 66 canals. All but the newest and highest bridge across the river are able to be opened and for at least two hours in the early morning they are opened to allow ships access to the Gulf of Finland.

Previously this area was owned by Sweden and on 1 May 1703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great (Tsar Peter I of Russia) captured the Swedish Fort on the Neva River. A few weeks later, on 27 May 1703, lower on the river, 5 km inland from the gulf, he laid the foundation stone for the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city. He named the city after his patron saint St Peter the apostle. The original name was meant to sound Dutch as a result of Peter's appreciation of Dutch Culture.

The city was built by conscripted serfs from all over Russia and also by Swedish prisoners of war. Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712. In 1725 Peter died and his near-lifelong autocratic push for modernisation of Russia had met with considerable opposition from the old-fashioned Russian nobility resulting in several attempts on his life and a treason case involving his own son, in 1728, Peter II of Russia moved his seat back to Moscow but four years later, in 1732, under Empress Anna of Russia, Saint Petersburg again became the capital of the Russian Empire and remained the seat of the government for 186 years until Lenin moved it back to Moscow.

The 1905 revolution began in Saint Petersburg and spread rapidly into the provinces. With the start of WW1, the name Saint Petersburg was perceived to be too German, so in 1914 the city was renamed Petrograd, a name under which it had already been known in other Slavic languages. In 1917 the February Revolution, which put an end to the Russian monarchy, and the October Revolution, which ultimately brought Lenin to power, broke out in Petrograd. The city's proximity to the border and anti-Soviet armies forced the Bolsheviks under Lenin to transfer the capital to Moscow on March 12, 1918.

During WW2, Leningrad was besieged by Germany; the siege lasted 872 days from September 1941 to January 1944 and was one of the longest, most destructive and most lethal of any major city in modern history. It isolated the city from most supplies except those provided through the Road of Life across the frozen Lake Ladoga and more than a million civilians died, mainly from starvation. Many others were eventually evacuated or escaped by themselves, so the city became largely depopulated and most buildings were badly damaged or destroyed.

Driving around the city it is difficult to believe that the city was so badly damaged as all the buildings many dating back to the 18^th Century have been restored as they were prior to the war. The authorities were able to find plans of many of the palaces as far away as Warsaw so were able use these plans for the restorations. Today the city has a law that prevents the alteration of the building façade if the interior is being modernised, if however the building has to be demolished it must be rebuilt in exactly the old style. Pity this law wasn’t applied to St Kilda Road and Collins Street in Melbourne.

We left the boat at 10:30 to drive to the Hermitage arriving there at 12:20. St Petersburg has one car for every three people and the average traffic speed is under four km/hr and it is expected that car ownership will soon be one in two and speed will drop to under two km/hr.

The Hermitage originally the The Winter Palace was from 1732 to 1917, the official residence of the Russian Tsars and was the fourth Winter Palace built and has been altered almost continuously between the late 1730s and 1837, when it was severely damaged by fire and immediately rebuilt. The storming of the palace in 1917 became an iconic symbol of the Russian Revolution.

The State Hermitage is one of the largest and oldest museums of the world; it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great who started her art collection in 1764 by purchasing paintings from a Berlin merchant, he had put together the collection for Frederick II of Prussia who ultimately refused to purchase it. The collection has been open to the public since 1852 and its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise nearly 3 million items, including the largest collection of paintings in the world.

The collections occupy a large complex of six historic buildings in the main museum complex, four, namely the Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage and New Hermitage, are partially open to the public. The other two are Hermitage Theatre and the Reserve House.

Arriving at the Hermitage our guide informed us that we would only see a part of the collection on display and would cover about 2km but if we wanted to see all the displays we would have to walk 32km. Included in our tour were works by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt

Raphael Leonardo da Vinci

There were several rooms of Impressionist, far more than we saw at the recent exhibition in Canberra. The collection of paintings and painters were amazing, and for several artists the Hermitage has the only known surviving examples of their work. One of the highlights of the visit was to see the 18^th Century Golden Peacock clock operating, our guide had never seen is operate in all the years she has been visiting the Hermitage.

The fact that any of the collection survived the German siege is testament to the dedication and hard work of the members of staff who were able to pack and transport across the frozen river a large part of the collection, what was unable to be moved was stored in the 7 m. thick crypt of St Isaacs Church. This Church survived the war due to its prominence, as a Russian general surmised the Germans wouldn’t bomb it as it was too valuable to them as a bombing landmark, he was correct and the balance of the collection survived. The Hermitage although badly damaged survived due to the dedication of many staff members who lived in the cellars and patrolled it during the siege putting out many fires, however it was estimated the two hectares of glass in its window was destroyed.

All our party would have liked to spend the whole day at the museum and were disappointed that the tour only allowed us three hours for the visit.

Catherine Palace

Thur 27 May

Another early start but this time we travelled on the ring road which saved us from most of the congestion. We arrived at The Catherine Palace which was the Rococo summer residence of the Russian tsars, located in the town of Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), 25 km south-east of St. Petersburg, Russia. The residence was built in 1717, when Catherine I of Russia engaged the German architect Johann-Friedrich Braunstein to construct a summer palace for her pleasure.

Probably the most famous room in the palace is the famed Amber Room which it totally lined with amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors, before it was lost in WW2, the original Amber Room represented a joint effort of German and Russian craftsmen. Construction of the Amber Room began in 1701 to 1709 in Prussia and was given to Peter the Great by the Prussian King. The amber panels covered more than 55 square meters and contained over six tons of amber. The Amber Room was looted during WW2 by the Germans but knowledge of its whereabouts was lost in the chaos at the end of the war.

When the German forces retreated after the seige, they had the residence intentionally destroyed, leaving only the hollow shell of the palace behind. Prior to the World War Two, the Russian archivists managed to document a fair amount of the contents, which proved of great importance in reconstructing the palace. In 1979 craftsmen began to rebuild the Amber room with amber donated by Russian citizens. Although the room was completed, and a large part of the palaace reconstruction was completed in time for the Tercentenary of St Petersburg in 2003, much work is still required to restore the palace to its former glory.

Walking through the palace to view the many rooms with gold encrusted decorations, it is hard to believe that after the war it was just a shell but it had a history of being destroyed. Peter the Great’s daughter, the Empress Elizabeth found her mother's residence outdated and incommodious and in May 1752 asked her court architect to demolish the old structure and replace it with a much grander edifice in a flamboyant Rococo style. The palace was famed for its obscenely lavish exterior. More than 100 kilograms of gold were used to gild the sophisticated stucco façade and numerous statues erected on the roof. It was even rumoured that the palace's roof was constructed entirely of gold.

Although the palace is popularly associated with Catherine the Great, she actually regarded its "whipped cream" architecture as old-fashioned. When she ascended the throne, a number of statues in the park were being covered with gold, in accordance with the last wish of Empress Elizabeth, yet the new monarch had all the works suspended upon being informed about the expense. In her memoirs she censured the reckless extravagance of her predecessor Elizabeth; who when she died left 15,000 dresses many encrusted with diamonds but only 6 Rubles in the State coffers.

Probably the most lavish room was the Reception room where visiting dignatories were greeted, all the decorations, candle holders and door frames were gold guilded, as were the three waiting rooms, though these varied in size and decoration and the visitors importance decided in which room they waited. These rooms also have stoves for heating the room, completely covered in Delft Blue tiles, which Peter the Great originally imported from Holland, most of these stoves were 5 - 6 m. high, Ann counted eighteen and wondered what it cost Peter the Great to import them. The many dining rooms were decorated in different styles and in Elizabeth’s time a dumb waiter system was developed that allowed the dining table to be raised from the lower floor, complete with food and the table setting.

It is interesting to consider that all the restorations of Moscow and St Petersburg particularly the palaces and churches were carried out in Soviet times when these establishlishments were not in keeping with Soviet philosophy.

In the afternoon we had a bus tour of the St Petersburg highlights, churches, palaces, parks and forts but it was disappointing that although we stopped to take photographs we didn’t have time to visit any of the venues.