Once again, click on the pics for a larger version!
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| The Winter Palace (only a part of the Hermitage!) |
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| On the steps of the State Museum |
Niko picked us up in his car, nicknamed “Boris,” and drove us to the Hermitage. Bob took one more exterior shot of the building that we all expected to be the highlight of the trip. Before going in, he also took a photo of Karin, Niko, and Steward in front of one of the building's many entrances.
The Hermitage, meaning a place of quiet and solitude, was named by Catherine the Great, who founded it, but that was then. Now tourists and tourist buses crowd around its main entrances. However, a quiet word from Niko to the guard whisked us past the long lines and into the building that we'd come many thousands of miles to see.
Technically, the Hermitage consists of six buildings, the central one being the Winter Palace of the tsars. Inside, it was not as jammed with tourists as we'd expected it to be, although there were points where the crush was so deep that we could barely see what was on the walls. This was particularly true of the room housing all the Rembrandt's, perhaps the largest collection in the world. We did catch a minute or two to see each of them before the next tour group flowed in like a tsunami. Other world-famous items were not quite as crowded, but often they were still obscured by tourists wanting to be photographed in front of them.
As we requested, Niko took us for the grand tour for a couple of hours before leaving us to make our own way. In particular, he showed us the state rooms, and his prediction was true. In comparison with the Winter Palace, those summer ones that we'd seen a couple of days ago seemed like mere cottages.
It's hard to describe the excesses of this building. We walked first up the grand staircase, and Bob took several shots of it along the way. 
Then we walked through room after room, each more opulent than the last. Bob took a few photos of rooms to give some idea of their size.
Finally, he gave up and focused on ceilings and parquet floors to give some idea of their incredible craftsmanship. One of the floors had connecting circles that seemed to run endlessly down a corridor of rooms, each circle made of exotic woods carefully shaped and connected by hand.
And that was just the state rooms. Through them and elsewhere in the museum's 1001 rooms were displayed some of the world's largest collection of paintings. We saw many “old friends” that we'd known from art books over the years, but a few stood out. For Karin, it was Fragonard's The Stolen Kiss. For all of us was Caravaggio's The Lute Player and Matisse's The Dance. When we made it finally to the last of these, the room was almost empty of tourists, and for a few minutes, we could be alone with it. The painting is over twelve feet by eight feet, so we could stare at it from across the room with no one posing in front of it.
In all, we spent six hours in the Hermitage, and Karin said that it had more than met her expectations. She found no dissenting opinions from either of us.
