The Hermitage and St. Isaac’s Colonnade

21 June.

As our group walked through Saint Petersburg on a gloriously sunny morning yesterday, Mike told us of our good fortune. Fewer than one in five days in Saint Petersburg, he told us, are mostly sunny. During our three-hour walk the temperature was mild and, excepting a few minutes now and then when clouds appeared suddenly and vanished with equal rapidity, the sky remained mostly cloudless until late in the afternoon. Believe it or not, today promises to be equally pleasant and if that holds, we will have faced only one predominantly rainy day over the length of our trip – the day at the Great Wall of China. (Okay, there was one day we were on the train that was also rainy but that’s irrelevant to the tour, no?) We had a threat of rain in Yekaterinburg and a bit of rain in Moscow but those amounted to nothing.

Today we begin our last day as a group of travelers and still our band gathered as we somehow have throughout the trip in the same unified rhythm that found us eating breakfast together despite having no set schedule. Both Lu and Groud came in sniffling and coughing meaning “the cold” has claimed its fifth and sixth victims. Erin seemed like a good candidate for number seven when she announced that her throat was feeling scratchy and that, I knew, was my initial symptom. While not nearly as sumptuous as the spread at the Park Inn in Yekaterinburg, the Anabel did offer a functional and filling breakfast with a small selection of breads, cheese, yogurt, sliced meat, cereal, and an offer to prepare eggs and sausage on request.

As I nibbled my toast and drank my tea, I noticed a young girl watching. It seems she was trying to work up the courage to talk to me because when I was nearly finished eating, she came to my table and asked me where I was from. I told her America and she responded by telling me that I speak Russian very well and with no accent. She must have overheard me saying доброе утро (good morning) or спасибо (thank you) or one of the dozen or so other Russian phrases I know. I thanked her but assured her that if she listened long enough my accent would emerge. (It shows up most noticeably in one particular glottal vowel and in the syllabic stress pattern because although I know that Russian generally stresses the root syllable, I don’t usually know which syllable constitutes the root.) She smiled and skipped away to her room.

The only item on today’s schedule was a visit to the Hermitage – a short walk of less than three kilometers as this Google map shows.

Although we’d have no guide, our admission was included in the price of the tour and Groud had arranged for us to meet someone who had purchased our tickets. We’d see when we arrived at the museum that having tickets was a small blessing because the line to purchase them was time consumingly long. I also liked the prospect of having no guide since it would allow us to wander through the museum at our own pace thus avoiding the dreaded (for me) let me show you how much I know three-hour guided tour that I believe is at its least appropriate in an art museum as large and comprehensive as the Hermitage. Also, each of us could now visit the areas of interest to us as individuals.

Our entry was scheduled for 11:00 so we had some leisure time before we needed to leave the hotel. I made another cup of tea and while I was sipping it Elizabeth, my new twelve-year-old friend from Moscow came out of her room. I thought I should return the favor and complimented her on her English. Her mother, who is apparently helping her learn English and who struck me immediately as something of a no-nonsense taskmaster, insisted that if Liza were to speak with me, her English needed to be good. The youngster and I chatted, she a bit nervously, about her studies and her travels and mine. She was also proud of her name because there has been only one Elizabeth in the Russian ruling family. That Elizabeth was a child of Peter the Great and was Empress for over two decades. With both of us aware of her mother eavesdropping from time to time, I tried to keep my side of the conversation simple and I don’t think this Elizabeth relaxed until our group prepared to leave.

I noted in an earlier entry that Hermitage originally referred only to the Small Hermitage constructed by order of Catherine the Great as an adjunct to the Winter Palace but that the name has now come to refer to the five buildings that comprise the entire museum complex. We entered, as most visitors do, the largest building, the Winter Palace passing through this courtyard.

In the four hours we spent in the museum, Erin and I never ventured beyond the Winter Palace and we saw only a fraction of a fraction of the collection in this building. Erin and I had decided to stay together because we’d both planned a post museum visit to the Colonnade at Saint Isaac’s Cathedral for the best panoramic views of Saint Petersburg. I think we were both fascinated with the building – Erin with the floors and I with the enormity of the place. I think a bit of both can be sensed in this photo.

I was fascinated with and a bit awestruck over the ornate details of so many of the rooms more of which can be seen here.

We spent most of our time looking at French painting from the early impressionists to mid-twentieth century, Italian Renaissance painting, and the Dutch masters. Erin was, as usual, flawless in following the floor plan. While we found our way into a few other areas and looked at some of the other artwork on display but we focused on only the three areas I noted. I have to admit that I found both the collection and the setting overwhelming.

One could spend days in the Hermitage and not see nearly everything and for me, after a few hours in an art museum, my brain goes numb. There comes a saturation point where staying in a museum like this becomes an exercise in futility because all I’m really doing is staring at the work with no ability to contemplate or connect with it let alone absorb anything from it.

Another motivation to leave was that I was, in fact, growing cranky with hunger.
So, at about 14:00, Erin and I made our exit and walked in the direction of Saint Isaac’s. We wandered a bit until we found a place where we stopped for lunch and ate with no serving mishaps. After lunch we purchased our tickets and climbed the two hundred plus steps to the Colonnade. I clicked madly away but I fear my little Nikon Coolpix didn’t do justice to the views looking west –

or east.

Interestingly, but I guess not wholly unexpectedly because it had happened so often on our Russian journey, we encountered a wedding party taking photos in a public space. I managed one shot of the bride and groom but wasn’t quick or adept enough to capture the moment he walked behind her lifting her gown’s train as they descended from the Colonnade.

Once again, we walked the three or four kilometers back to the hotel stopping along the way in one amazing shop that sold the most beautiful looking pastries. These were miniature works of art and I thought of taking pictures of them but contained that impulse. I also contained the impulse to buy something because all too often in my experience the taste fails to match the presentation. We arrived at the Anabel at about 16:30.

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the full explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.