Speaking about the politics of plunder, it seems like a logical next step to go from the British Museum to the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Don’t get me wrong though, it’s one of my favourite places in the world. I have spent as many hours marvelling at London goldsmith and jeweller James Cox’s Peacock Clock with the tour groups in their hovering hoards, as I have in the desolate and far-flung halls of ancient Scythian burial ground gold from southern Russia.

However, the Hermitage has its fair share of interesting history. Established in the late eighteenth century by Catherine the Great, the Hermitage is now home to over three million works of art. I’ve heard something along the lines of ‘not the largest museum in the world, but definitely not the second largest’ being said about its sheer size, but apparently the Guinness Book of Records isn’t afraid to lump accolades upon it – recognising the Hermitage as having the world’s largest collection of paintings.

The Hermitage also contains a sizable amount of Trojan treasures, which were apparently unearthed from Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, and in turn unearthed from Berlin museums by the Red Army in 1945. So it goes…

Despite gifts from artists and ‘donations’ of private art collections seized from the Tsars’ palaces during the early Soviet period, the years pre-1945 are regarded as a time of shocking loss for the museum. During the 1920s and 1930s, when art was smeared with the label ‘bourgeois and decadent’, many thousands of priceless masterpieces were sold internationally or redistributed to other museums across the Soviet Union in a process of nationalisation.

Maybe you are familiar with the regal exhibition halls of the Winter Palace (part of the Hermitage collection’s complex of buildings) without even having set foot in the museum. The film Russian Ark (which I still haven’t managed to see in its entirety, and if you have I congratulate you, I just don’t have the stamina) was an ambitious attempt by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov to chart the three-hundred years of life in the Winter Palace, albeit, filmed as a single-shot walkthrough period piece.


This is not art: pick the odd one out! I’ll give you a clue, Marcel Duchamp is NOT exhibited at the Hermitage…
For all you eagle-eyed out there, you would have noticed instantly that while the sculptures in the images on the left and right are of Greek origin, the image in the middle is a toilet. On a stretched budget it’s all about the art, and not about fancy facilities and providing toilet paper. They might be a necessary port of call, but they aren’t part of the display!