Let’s start the year with a walk through the Hermitage!

Photos of a short walk through the main museum of St. Petersburg – the State Hermitage

The museum complex includes several buildings. You can write a whole book about each of them. Someday I will tell you more about these buildings. Today I would like to share with you a photo of my visit to this famous museum and tell you how to get there in our difficult time of prohibitions and restrictions.

How to get there by metro

The address of the Main Museum Complex is Dvortsovaya Embankment, 32-38. The closest to the Winter Palace, through which the entrance to the exposition is carried out, is the Admiralteyskaya metro station, which takes about seven minutes to walk from it to the museum.

How to get to the Hermitage

Tickets for visiting the Hermitage can be bought both at the ticket office at the entrance. Also on the website of the museum complex. I visited the exposition with electronic tickets. In this case you don’t have to stand in a long line. However, some visitors with tickets purchased via the Internet do not know about this!

When buying tickets, you can choose one of the routes, No. 1 and No. 2. As indicated on the museum’s website, when choosing the first option, visitors will first of all have access to the ceremonial rooms of the Winter Palace and the collections of the Old and New Hermitages. The second route involves acquaintance with the interiors of the palace and objects of Russian, Oriental, English and French art. The streams of both routes intersect, so you can unnoticeably switch from one to the other. For the convenience of guests, along with the tickets, a link to the plan of the museum complex is sent to the e-mail.

The cost of visiting the Main Museum Complex is 500 rubles. For pensioners, students and some other categories there is a reduced price. If in the past in all branches of the Hermitage there was a day of free admission for all comers. Today only some of the guests (pensioners and students) can take a look at the exposition free of charge on the third Thursday of each month. All information in the article is provided for December 2021. News about visiting the complex can be followed on the official website of the museum.

A few facts about the Hermitage

• The museum was founded in 1764, when Empress Catherine II acquired more than two hundred paintings from the merchant I.E. Gotskovsky. Initially, the collection existed as a personal collection of the ruler.

• Objects of art were housed in the premises of the Winter Palace, called the Hermitage (from the French ermitage – “place of solitude”). This is where the name of the museum comes from.
• The Hermitage was opened to visitors in 1852, already during the reign of Catherine II’s grandson, Nicholas I.

The Hermitage is not only the famous Winter Palace. The museum complex also includes the buildings of the Small, New, Large (Old) Hermitage and the Hermitage Theater. In addition, today the museum has several branches: the General Headquarters, the Menshikov Palace, the Winter Palace of Peter I, the Museum of the Imperial Porcelain Factory, the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Center.

If by the end of the 18th century the Hermitage collection consisted of 3,000 paintings and 100,000 drawings, today the museum’s holdings amount to more than 3,000,000 exhibits. There are even such calculations: if, while walking around the Hermitage, you stop at each piece of art for a minute and spend eight hours a day on it, to see the entire collection, you will need about 15 years.