Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the laying of the first stone for the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre

The construction of this unique museum complex has a long history and is still continuing today. The general plan for the construction of the Hermitage Repository was approved in 1984. A plot of land in an industrial zone of the Primorsky District of what was then Leningrad was allocated to the storage facilities and restoration laboratories. In the mid-1980s, when work had only just begun, it was not intended that the complex would be open to the public, but in the process of implementation a new concept emerged: the huge floor space made it possible to organize the presentation of the stocks to visitors with practically no change to the architectural design.

On 4 December 1990, the first stone for the construction of the Repository was ceremonially laid. On that day, staff of the Hermitage and of the building firm Lemminkäinen left a letter to posterity in a “time capsule”: “On this spot, during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR and the presidency of Mauno Koivisto in Finland, the foundation stone was laid for the Repository of the State Order of Lenin Hermitage of the USSR Ministry of Culture, constructed on the basis of a contract concluded between the USSR Ministry of Culture, the All-Union Foreign Trade Organization Soyuzvneshstroyimport and the joint-stock company Lemminkäinen. The construction of the present facility will improve the state of preservation of the art treasures of the USSR and further the development of cultural and commercial relations between the USSR and Finland.”

The State Hermitage’s innovative Restoration and Storage Centre, also known as the Hermitage Repository, is a multifunctional complex intended to provide state-of-the-art conditions for the storage and restoration of the museum’s collections. Each building in the complex is fitted with specialized museum equipment and has its own definite functional purpose. The main Repository Block, opened in 2003 for the tercentenary of Saint Petersburg, contains collections of the Department of Western European Fine Art, the Department of the History of Russian Culture and the Department of the East. The second phase of construction, completed in 2012, presents the stocks of the Department of the Archaeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia and the Department of Classical Antiquity. Besides the open and closed storage facilities, the blocks contain halls for temporary exhibitions, fourteen restoration laboratories and a biological monitoring laboratory, as well as an archaeological classroom used for work with blind and partially sighted children under the programme “The Past at Your Fingertips”.

At the present time, work is underway on the construction of the third phase of the Hermitage in Staraya Derevnya. The plan is that after completion of the building work the city will receive the world’s largest complex of this kind, which will not only meet the needs of the museum but will also become a cultural attraction for locals and tourists.

At the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre, work is constantly going on to refresh the open storage facilities, meaning that those who visit regularly are able to discover something new practically every time. The open-storage facility for carriages and harness is now presenting one of the latest exhibits to have entered the museum collection – a gift from the Netherlands TextielMuseum in the form of a huge tapestry (1.7 × 7.5 metres) created by the well-known Dutch designer Koen Taselaar. The artist worked for several months with literary sources and artistic images from Russian culture, studied the history of weaving in the Netherlands and Russia, lubok prints and the architectural monuments of Saint Petersburg. In the tapestry some fantastic scenes unfold before viewers’ eyes – it combines together in single space Russian rulers Peter I, Catherine II and Nicholas II, the famous Hermitage cats, the Winter Palace, New Holland and the Kunstkammer in a magical, yet recognizable world of the history and myths of Saint Petersburg. The project was initiated by the Hermitage 21st Century Foundation and the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Saint Petersburg in 2019 and won a grant for the creation of an unusual gift to the Hermitage in the run-up to the celebrations for the 350th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great. In November 2020, the Netherlands Council for Culture named the project to produce this new exhibit for the State Hermitage among the three best Dutch efforts during the period of quarantine restrictions.

It is a noteworthy fact that the designer of the Repository’s third construction phase is also a Dutchman – the celebrated architect Rem Koolhaas. His plan comprises several buildings connected by an aerial walkway over the railway line. The main block is a multistorey glass cube destined for the Large Hermitage Library. The new blocks will also contain a multimedia library, lecture and exhibition halls, an Institute for the Study of Costume and Fashion, and much else.

At the ceremony celebrating the 30th anniversary of the laying of the first stone for the Hermitage Repository, speeches were given by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, Alexei Bogdanov, Deputy General Director of the State Hermitage, and Svetlana Adaksina, Deputy General Director and Chief Curator of the State Hermitage. The Dutch museum’s gift to the Hermitage was presented by Lionel Veer, the Dutch Consul General in Saint Petersburg, Errol van de Werdt, Director of the TextielMuseum and Textile Laboratory, and the tapestry’s creator, Koen Taselaar. At the end of the ceremony, on the site of the third phase of the Restoration and Storage Centre, a stone was laid in the foundations of the Hermitage Library along with a “time capsule” containing a message to posterity in the name of Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky.

The project for the presentation of a tapestry to the Hermitage from the Dutch TextielMuseum was accomplished with the support of: