Just as we had
erred in our understanding of the closing time of the Hermitage the
previous day, we made a mistake about its opening time as well on
Wednesday morning. But this one got us to the entrance a half hour
earlier than opening time, but there was a murmur among those
gathered there and this was not just about the rain falling down on
them as well as the large square in front of the entrance. An air of
confusion hung over the square with people muttering “closed today”
or some such negative phrase. The multiple entrances to the museum
and the lack of signage only added to the confusion. As we tried to
make our way ahead at the place we had entered the previous
afternoon, the staff pointed with their fingers to the next one and
from there we were sent around the corner to the group entrance. We
then realized that we were early and so waited out the remaining
minutes in the rain as the queue grew behind us. The murmurs got
louder and we heard weird phrases like “today only groups allowed,
no individual tickets” and “Putin is here” etc.
All of these
sounded like typical pranks played by the mischievous elements for a
laugh but we found out that there was much truth to these. No signs
were put out in any language but we were told at the entrance (by
another visitor) that “the President is having an important meeting
inside and as a security measure, individual tickets are not allowed
today. Tomorrow”. The staff did not bother with any niceties and
simply told off visitors who had paid money for their tickets
“Tomorrow!”.
Turns out that
Putin was having a meeting with an Austrian official in one of the
rooms inside. The Hermitage’s loss was Faberge Musuem’s gain. We
quick footed our way to the Fontanka river where the former
Neoclassical Shuvalov Palace (formerly owned by aristocratic families
– Countess Maria Naryshkina was lady-in-waiting to Catherine the
Great) – is now the site of a large collection of Faberge eggs and
other such articles favored by the very wealthy. It served as the
House of Peace and Friendship in Soviet times and in 2006, the palace
was restored and the museum was opened to the public in 2013.
It
features a marble staircase, large ballroom, the Blue Drawing Room
and 12 galleries displaying over 200 Faberge objects – acquired
from the Forbes Foundation in New York for over $100 million. The
museum collection also features paintings, enamel work, porcelain and
textiles.
The House of
Fabergé is a jewellery firm found in 1842 in St. Petersburg by
Gustav Faberge. At its height, the firm employed 700 people across
many factories and in four shops in Russia and one in London. His
descendants followed him in running the business till it was
nationalized by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The master jeweler Carl
Fabergé, designed elaborate jewel-encrusted Fabergé eggs for the
tsar family. The tradition of tsars giving their wives jeweled Easter
eggs began in 1885 when Alexander III commissioned the 37-year-old
Peter Carl Fabergé to create a present for his Danish wife Maria
Feodorovna. Their son, the last tsar Nicholas II, continued making
eggs for his mother, now the dowager empress, and his own wife
Alexandra Feodorovna. Apart from the intricate miniature work, the
eggs featured “surprises” effected through clever mechanisms that
revealed even smaller treasures within the eggs. The highlight of the
museum is the room with 14 of these eggs (including 9 Easter eggs)
displayed in glass containers that can be viewed 360 degrees. Even if
one is put off by the lavishness of how the moneyed lived in Imperial
times, the quality of the workmanship does merit admiration.
Inside
the museum are The Knights’ Hall – with precious wine goblets,
drinking horns, silver vessels, military memorabilia and paintings,
the Red Room – with silk walls and dark-stained walnut woodwork and
more fine gold and silver work, from elaborate tankards to precious
metals made to resemble wicker and cloth.
The Blue Room has
the 14 Fabergé eggs, displayed in chronological order. The first egg
(commissioned by Alexander III in 1885) held a golden yolk, which
enclosed a golden hen concealing a diamond miniature of the royal
crown and a ruby egg. Later eggs contain increasingly complex
mechanisms. A miniature Jesus emerges from a tomb made of agates, a
rose-colored egg contains a bud whose petals spring open with the
press of a button to reveal a diamond crown. The coronation of
Nicholas II is celebrated by an egg that reveals an astonishingly
detailed miniature coronation carriage – complete with working
wheels and suspension.
After this come
the other rooms where there is more to see: snuff boxes, watches,
belt buckles, paintings and icons.
The Gold Room displays “cabinet
gifts” presented by people who curried favor with the Romanovs. The
Gothic Room is filled with exquisite icons. The White and Blue Room
shows off shimmering enamel, silverwork, filigree and porcelain.
There are only so
many museums one can visit in day and as we emerged outdoors to
streets drying out the morning rain, we opted to walk through
unexplored streets for the afternoon. We had run out of veggie-café
chains, but we were well fed at Teremok – not a veggie-café chain
but a chain with plenty of veggie friendly options without anything
lost in translation. They served crepes and borscht – a must eat
soup that is quintessentially Russian (and Eastern European) with its
distinctive beetroot color caused by its main ingredient.
Other City
sights
Ostrovsky Square
(Ploschad Ostrovskogo), created by the architect Carlo Rossi
(1775-1849) is anchored by a huge statue of Catherine the Great on
top of her many trusted advisers – Prince Grigory Potemkin is the
one to her right.
He gave rise to the term “Potemkin village”
that stands for a construction (literal or figurative) that is
intended to deceive others. In this case, Catherine the Great, for
all her astuteness, is supposed to have been deceived by Potemkin
into believing that the makeshift villages he created in the Crimean
peninsula (after the Russo-Turkish war) were real. He apparently had
them dismantled as she passed through and had them re-staged and
populated by “Russian villagers” further along her route. This
story sounds far-fetched (and it probably is) but it is still a good
one to tell. In 1972, when Nixon visited the city, Nevsky Prospekt
was spruced up to disguise the USSR’s economic hardships. Since he
viewed the street from a limo, only the bottom two floors of each
façade was spruced up.
Behind the square
is the Alexandrinsky Theater, a Neoclassical yellow building erected
by Rossi in 1828. The portico of six Corinthian columns is crowned by
a chariot of Apollo, patron of the arts.
The theater is named after
Alexandra, wife of Nicholas I. It is the oldest drama theater in
Russia. This is where, in 1896, Anton Chekhov premiered The
Seagull, not initially well received by critics or the public.
Gogol’s The Inspector General (1836) was also premiered
here. Behind the theater, the famous Ulitsa Rossi stretches from
Ostrovsky to Lomonosov Squares. This exceptional looking street was
designed by Rossi to follow the canons of classical antiquity – its
height and width are identical at 22 metres and its length is exactly
10 times the width. At No. 2 on this street is the home of the former
Imperial School of Ballet, named after the teacher Agrippina Vaganova
(1879-1951), one of the few dancers not to emigrate after the
Revolution. It has produced many of Russia’s celebrated dancers
including Pavlova and Nureyev.
Sennaya
Ploschad (a busy square and the only one with 3 metro lines
running underneath) is one of St. Petersburg's oldest squares. Its
name (“Haymarket”) derives from the original market where
livestock, fodder and firewood were sold when it opened in the 1730s.
By the 19th century, it had become synonymous with dirt,
squalor, crime and vice. It was immortalized by Dostoevsky, who lived
all over the neighbourhood and set Crime and Punishment
here. During the Soviet era, the square was given a new image and
stallholders were banished. It was optimistically renamed Ploschad
Mira (Peace). This is the name by which Anthony Burgess refers to it
in his nightmarish vision of the Soviet regime in his 1963
novel Honey for the Bears. Still,
until very recently the square was overloaded with makeshift kiosks
and market stalls, which made it a magnet for the undesirable
elements. It was cleaned up in 2003 but still retains a fundamental
air of roughness.
Not sure what to expect, we covered the short distance from Nevsky to
a busy square with people quite different from those on Nevsky and
other areas frequented by tourists. A Peruvian group was entertaining
a small crowd on the square. Shops with a middle-eastern flavor with
languages and people from that region could be seen and heard.
After
a brief excursion through a shopping center and watching the scene at
the square, we walked up Sadovaya street to Gostiny Dvor and even
shopped for neck attire for V inside!
Back on Nevsky as
we exited Gostiny Dvor, we kept good on our mental note to visit
Yelisevey’s Emporium two days ago. It is housed in a strikingly
decorated Art Noveau building on Nevsky Prospekt. Once the purveyor
of fine food to the Russian aristocracy, it was demoted during the
Soviet era into a grocery store. Today it is a boutique deli with
astoundingly colorful displays of cheese and chocolates. V was very
taken with the massive pineapple that stood at the centre of the
café.
Ironically, the
last location we visited in the city was among the first we saw when
we arrived Sunday morning. The distinctive oxidized-copper tower of
the Art Nouveau building on the corner of Griboyedov Canal and Nevsky
Prospekt is the Singer House (Russian HQ of the sewing machine
company) which houses Dom Knigi (“House of Books”). After
browsing through the bookstore we quickly headed upstairs to the café
where we sampled some kvass – traditional Russian fermented
beverage made from rye bread while watching busy Nevsky below and
majestic Kazan cathedral across as the evening yielded to darkness
and brought an end to our 4 day St. Petersburg visit. As the night
came on, we walked back to Art Rachmaninov to collect our bags and
caught a bus back to Moskovsky Vokzal to catch our train to Moscow.
2025-02-08