Saint Petersburg, Russia
Государственный Эрмитаж · er-mee-TAHZH
The green and white Winter Palace of the tsars on the Neva, with four more buildings behind it, holding some three million objects. Catherine the Great began the collection in 1764 as her private retreat, her "hermitage". In 1917 the revolution came through its doors, and in the siege of 1941–44 its keepers lived in its cellars and guarded empty frames.
Photo: Godot13, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
The Winter Palace was built in 1754–1762 for Empress Elizabeth by the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli: some fifteen hundred rooms behind a front two hundred metres long on the river. Her successor Catherine II bought 225 paintings from a Berlin merchant in 1764, and kept buying. She built a smaller palace next door to hold them, and called it her hermitage.
Only "mice and I admire all this," she wrote. In 1852 Nicholas I opened a new building to the public. In 1917 the palace became a museum, and today the State Hermitage spreads over the Winter Palace, three Hermitage buildings, a theatre, and the General Staff Building across the square.
One ticket for the Main Museum Complex covers the Winter Palace and the Small, Old and New Hermitage, with all temporary exhibitions. The General Staff Building (Impressionists and modern art) has its own ticket. The museum also runs other sites in the city.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Winter Palace state rooms | Main ticket |
| The Small Hermitage: Pavilion Hall and Peacock Clock | Main ticket |
| Italian and Dutch painting | Main ticket |
| The East: Western Xia, Dunhuang, China | Main ticket |
| The General Staff Building | Own ticket |
You came up the white and gold state staircase. It is named for the Epiphany procession that went down it each January to bless the waters of the Neva through a hole in the ice.
Burned in the fire of 1837, it was rebuilt in two years exactly as before. The ceiling shows the gods of Olympus.
Ask for the Pavilion Hall, in the Small Hermitage. A golden peacock, an owl and a cockerel sit in a cage of gilded branches. The clock was made in London by James Cox and bought by Prince Potemkin for Catherine in 1781. It still works.
"The Hermitage is a single palace." It is six main buildings linked together, and the visitor sees only part of them.
"You can see it in a day." Walking every room would take days. Choose: the state rooms, the Italian and Dutch painting, and one other collection.
"The storming of the Winter Palace was a great battle." Most of the famous images are from Eisenstein's film October of 1928 and a mass re-enactment of 1920. On the night of 25–26 October 1917 the palace was taken with few deaths.
"The Impressionists are in the palace." Matisse, Picasso and the Impressionists are in the General Staff Building across Palace Square, entered by the same ticket.
We searched Russian, Chinese and English sources for this list.
Enter from Palace Square through the courtyard. Pick up a map. These eight stops take about three hours.
The square is closed by the curved yellow General Staff Building with its triumphal arch. In the middle stands the Alexander Column, 47 metres high. Its red granite shaft is a single stone, held in place only by its own weight. It celebrates the victory over Napoleon.
Beyond the staircase is a chain of great halls on the Neva side: the Field Marshals' Hall, the Armorial Hall, the Great Throne Room of St George. They were built for receptions of two or three thousand guests.
Here, at the end of Russian Ark, a ball ends and the guests stream down the Jordan Staircase. Photography without flash is allowed: stand at the top of the stair, looking down the flight, and take the same picture.
A long gallery hung with 332 portraits of the generals who fought Napoleon, most painted by the Englishman George Dawe and his assistants. Some frames are empty, with only a name: the generals had died and no portrait of them could be found.
Columns, pilasters and vases faced with green malachite from the Urals, two tonnes of it. Here the Provisional Government held its last meetings in October 1917. Next door, in the small dining room, its ministers were arrested; the clock on the mantel was stopped at 2:10.
White marble, gold and crystal chandeliers in a Moorish and Renaissance mix of the 1850s. Mosaic in the floor copies one found in a Roman bath. Look out of the windows: the hanging garden is on the first floor.
The Peacock Clock is wound and set going once a week; the museum announces when. The peacock spreads its tail, the owl turns its head and the cock crows. The dial is in a mushroom at the bottom.
The Raphael Loggias are a copy, made for Catherine, of the painted corridor in the Vatican. Nearby are two small paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, the Benois Madonna and the Madonna Litta. Fewer than twenty paintings by him survive in the world.
The Rembrandt room holds The Return of the Prodigal Son, painted near the end of his life. The father's two hands on the kneeling son are different: one broad, one fine. His Danaë, nearby, was attacked with acid and a knife in 1985 and took twelve years to restore.
On the top floor are the museum's collections from the East. In 1908–09 the Russian explorer Pyotr Kozlov dug in the dead city of Khara-Khoto, in what is now Inner Mongolia, a city of the Tangut state of Western Xia (1038–1227). He brought back paintings, sculptures and thousands of books.
Among them is a woodblock print of Guan Yu, the general of the Three Kingdoms (220–280), printed in Pingyang in the Jin dynasty (1115–1234). It is one of the oldest printed pictures of him. The Hermitage also keeps wall paintings and statues from Dunhuang, brought by Sergei Oldenburg's expedition of 1914–15.
How these things came here, and whether some should go home, is a question China and other countries have raised about many museums. For now, this is the place to see Western Xia painting.
During the 872 days of the siege of Leningrad, from 1941 to 1944, the empty frames stayed on the walls so that the paintings could be rehung at once. About two thousand people lived in the cellars. Guides led tours of the empty rooms, describing the paintings from memory.
The museum keeps about fifty cats in its cellars to hunt mice, a custom that goes back to the empress Elizabeth. They have their own day each spring.
Catherine founded the collection in 1764, the twenty-ninth year of the Qianlong emperor (1736–1795). She and Qianlong were the two great collectors of their age, and never met. The Winter Palace was stormed in 1917, the sixth year of the Chinese Republic.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1762 | The Winter Palace is finished | The Seven Years' War |
| 1764 | Catherine buys her first 225 paintings | Mozart, aged eight, plays in London |
| 1837 | The great fire | Victoria becomes queen |
| 1852 | The New Hermitage opens to the public | Uncle Tom's Cabin is published |
| 1908–09 | Kozlov digs at Khara-Khoto | Ford's Model T |
| 1917 | The Winter Palace is taken | The United States enters the First World War |
| 1941–1944 | The siege of Leningrad | The war in the Pacific |
One line to remember: Catherine's hermitage became everybody's museum.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Empress Elizabeth is said to have ordered the best mouse-catching cats of Kazan sent to the Winter Palace in 1745. Their descendants, people say, still guard the cellars.
Source: A decree of 1745 asking for Kazan cats is often cited; the line of descent is legend
Guards on night duty tell of a lady in a white dress who walks the empty halls, some say Empress Elizabeth, some say Catherine.
Source: A story told to visitors; we found no reliable early account
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. Russian press on the Hermitage's new ticket prices, July 2026, and the museum's own announcements.
Checked 2026-11-12
Opening hours are given in the local time of the place.
Stand at the site, sign in, press the button, and collect its stamp. Your browser will ask to use your location. It is sent to us once to confirm that you are at the site; we keep how far you were from it, not the spot where you stood.
Your stamps are saved to your account, so they follow you to any device. Checking from a browser cannot rule out every false location; stricter checks arrive with the app.
Photos here show the place, not people. Each one is credited to the visitor who took it and appears after our team has looked at it. A photo with you in it belongs under “I am here”.