Our final day in St Petersburg begins with 4 hours at the much hyped Hermitage museum. I love art but am by no means an afficionado. Having said that I have been to the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay and the British Gallery as well as regularly seeing the special exhibits we get at the NGV at home. They say that the Hermitage has 3 million works of art and to see all of them and just spending 1 second to look would take one 11 years! I must admit I thought that the highlight of the tour will be the actual Winter Palace that it is housed in rather than the artworks themselves. How wrong could I be? This palace delivers in spades. It is an amazing collection of work from the old Italian masters to the present day and pretty much every famous artist you can think of is represented here. Like the rest of St Petersburg, mind boggling!!
Our afternoon tour was to a lesser attraction the Yusupov palace. This is an uninspiring yellow building set on one of the main canals from the outside. It is the family home of one of the prominent noble families in the Romanov empire. On the inside the opulence is once again dazzling but the real attraction here is in the basement, the very spot where the notorious Rasputin, monk, healer,probable lover of the Russian queen was invited to dinner on a fateful night in 1916. The nobility was growing increasingly anxious about Rasputin’s influence at court and a number of them decided to put an end to this. Felix Yusupov invited him for dinner. Rasputin survived the cyanide laced cakes so Yusupov shot him, Rasputin escaped and was shot again before finally being thrown into the icy canal. When is frozen body was recovered the autopsy revealed that his lungs were full of water, he survived the poisoning and shooting and was drowned.
An effective reconstruction in the basement brings the whole fascinating episode of history to life.
