St. Petersburg, Russia: Day Three, Part One

Winter Palace (Hermitage Museum, on right), Alexander Column, and the Admiralty (left) on Palace Square

If it’s Friday, it’s the Hermitage.  That’s the plan.
       As I head out at 10, I tell Olga at the front desk that “if I’m not back by 7, call the police because I’ll be lost somewhere in the Hermitage”.  She laughs.  I’m serious.  It’s huge.
       I make a deal with the Weather Gods:  no rain until I get into the museum.  And it works!
       I don’t know how many buildings the Hermitage has, but I see five of them before the day is over.  I think there’s only one more:  the theater.
       I get there a bit before 10:30, and do as the instructions on my online ticket say:  “Please approach the Internet Ticket Booth”.  (I shouldn’t laugh; I couldn’t write that in Russian.)  Very hospitably, they let us in, and our coats are not the first in the coat check.  I try to rent an audioguide, but they’re already all taken.  It’ll be just me, my eyes, and possibly signage in Cyrillic and English!

Chapel

The Royal Apartments come first, at the top of the majestic stairs.  At first, the rooms are almost empty of people, but soon enough groups arrive, crowding us more with their noise than their space, given the size of the rooms.  As I look around at all the majesty, an English guide spots my shoes (again a dead give-away) and gives me a tip.  He points to a place people aren’t going:  the Chapel, which is off to one side.  It’s all white and gold, with the parquet floors so resolutely waxed that they reflect the splendor of the room almost like a mirror.

Malachite Room

       Rooms lead to more rooms; sometimes you need to double back because there are two strings of them for the same wing of the building.
       I'd been told that the Malachite Room was not to be missed.  Another wonder.  Named for the striking green stone used in its many columns and the fireplace, as well as a gigantic urn, it links the state rooms to the private rooms.  I begin to imagine Tsar Nicholas I and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna here, which is easy to do because it's still decorated as it was back then:  the chandeliers ablaze, setting the gilt ceiling to shimmering, the intricate inlaid floor, the heavy velvet draperies...


Yet by far the most fascinating object I see in the entire Hermitage is The Peacock Clock, bought - in pieces like an Ikea kit! - by Prince Potemkin.  But before it could be reassembled, Potemkin had died and Catherine the Great had taken over.  The clock has a carillon that marks the quarter hours and chimes out the hours, with its English-made clockwork, attributed to James Cox, hidden inside a big mushroom.  A dragonfly on that mushroom acts as a second hand, rotating at one-second intervals. The owl, peacock and rooster are all automated.  As the sign explains, “The cage surrounded with little bells and containing the owl begins to rotate, the owl moves its head twitching its eyes as it opens and shuts them and raises its paw, and the little bells play a soft tune.  Then the peacock steps in.  It raises its head regally, opens its tail and slowly turns around, stands still for a moment, then quickly turns back and folds its tail.  At last, the cock crows three or four times.”  And then there's the squirrel eating his nut.  The goldwork of it all is so finely crafted that I spend a long time just looking at it all.  Amazing!

     
Aside from the majesty of the place, another thing that’s different from the Russian Museum yesterday is the younger age of the guards. But as the day wears on, they seem to grow older.   All but one that I see are women, and that one man was nattily dressed, as if going to a ball... which I guess is logical, given that this was the tsar’s palace!  Some respond to a nod and a smile; others avert their eyes.
       Unable to find a particular statue, I ask “Michelangelo?” to one guard; she accompanies me to a side room where his statue of a Crouching Boy reigns over the space. A few minutes later, after marveling at Michelangelos's amazing gift for turning stone into flesh, I head back to thank her, and it seems to take her a moment to remember who I am. After all, I’m just one of so many thousands of people who walk past her every day.

     I pretty much see all the exhibits - which takes hours! - including the upper level where there’s almost no one except a few Oriental tourists.  Logical, because this is the Oriental department, which includes a temporary show of exceptional ceramic pieces on loan from the National Museum of Korea.

       As I leave the Hermitage after more than four hours, I see the same audioguide rental woman behind her counter.  Out of sheer curiosity I ask her how long she works and she tells me she’s there all day, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.!