Mikhail Piotrovsky: How to take our culture to the world.

I recently returned from Armenia. I visited Karmir Blur together with the Mayor of Yerevan and we discussed the work connected with that site.

There are two ancient fortresses in Yerevan. One of them is Erebuni, where the inscription was found from which the name Yerevan derives. The other is the Urartian fortress of Teishebaini on Karmir Blur hill. In the early 6th century BC, enemies took it by storm. The walls collapsed and buried everything that was inside. The excavations conducted by Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky from 1939 onwards became a sensation.

The existence of the state of Urartu had been known, but there was a lack of artefacts associated with it. And here a stream of material culture opened up. Almost every turn of the spade brought up more finds: an inscription, a helmet, a dagger, beautiful vessels… The Urartu Hall in the Hermitage is just a small part of what was uncovered.

The history of Armenia instantly became more ancient. Armenian archaeology attained world level. There are only two or three sites like Karmir Blur in the world.

That is not the only thing. Karmir Blur was a symbol of Russia’s sound presence in Armenia. It was one of the main archaeological sites in the USSR, a place to which people came to learn, to see what the romance of archaeology was. A place where one might find a vessel containing the skeletons of a cat and a mouse. The cat chased the mouse into the vessel and while inside they were both buried. From the grains we can tell which cereals were being grown, from a pomegranate blossom the season when the storm took place.

We call many things archaeology. Karmir Blur resembles Troy and Babylon. Archaeologists and students travelled there, hundreds of people from Leningrad. It was a joint expedition of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia and the Hermitage. Around the archaeological “tumult” a concept of our city as a cultured and scholarly capital formed and the cultural tie between Leningrad and Yerevan strengthened.

In the 1970s, when the excavations finished, Karmir Blur became a tourist attraction and then everything went into decline. There was no proper decision what to do with it. When a place stands empty, it turns into a rubbish heap.

Now plans have been made to revive Karmir Blur. The rubbish has been removed; a grove of trees planted. A new form of museumification needs to be devised, where there is potential for virtual reality and small-scale excavations, so that people can see how it’s done. There are ideas we would like to implement. We need to think up something different, something special.

An example that might seem to be off-topic. The international Armenian community has created the Aurora festival to commemorate the Armenian genocide. Each year awards are made to those who save people from death. They do not keep the prize of roughly a million dollars to themselves, but hand it over to some or other organizations. This year the award went to a man that saved Yazidi women who were being killed by ISIL and a woman who fought against secret prisons in Yemen. That’s a new way of commemorating the past.

Something unusual needs to be created for Karmir Blur. The Hermitage is involved in that work.

The Hermitage is a concentrated representation of what Petersburg culture is with all its pluses and minuses. It is no mere chance that we rush about holding Hermitage Days. They have just taken place in Venice. A scholarly conference was held there devoted to the future of museums. Among other things, there was a showing of the documentary film Hermitage. The Power of Art. The film is not so much about the museum as about history. It includes the revolution, the war and Saint Petersburg. The film was shot by Italians and has been bought by 52 countries. The museum is a guide conducting people into the history of Saint Petersburg. Responding to the name of the museum, people come to look at the city.

I remember a time when around the world the name of our city was quite often associated with the Hermitage.

We are intending to hold Hermitage Days in Turku. An international conference on new museum technologies is to take place there. Besides us, the Hermitage–Amsterdam Centre and representatives of museums in northern Europe will be participating. It’s all constructed around the Hermitage and, that means, Saint Petersburg.

Recently we signed an agreement with one company on holding an exhibition of porcelain in Vietnam. Pieces made by the Imperial Porcelain Factory will be going there. Porcelain came to Europe from the Orient. Now the history of Russian porcelain from the Hermitage will be presented in the Orient. The exhibition will be supplemented with lectures on Russian art and culture.

There is a well-tuned mechanism for telling people about Saint Petersburg, about how beautiful it is. But the mechanism for taking Petersburg culture to the world has not been fine-tuned yet. There are problems with Petersburg culture itself nowadays. I can say without false modesty that museums are helping to raise its prestige.

We hear endless complaints about how difficult it is to get into the Hermitage during the tourist season. About the constant crowds there. In that sense our museum is a model of Russia. Compared to European countries, it’s not easy to come to our country: you have to obtain a visa, struggle across the borders… Those who do manage it are satisfied with the result. It’s the same with the Hermitage. Getting in is hard; inside the museum’s good.

Now, when electronic visas are being introduced for visits to Saint Petersburg, we are beginning to think how to make access to the Hermitage easier. We are thinking about electronic tickets for staggered entry times. We don’t know yet what will come of it. Tourist groups come for specific times and still they are queuing up. We are studying the experience of the Louvre, where they have introduced a system of staggered entry times and sell tickets through the Internet. But does that mean that someone who can’t use the Internet won’t get into the museum? And what about someone who spontaneously decides to visit. Entry to the National Gallery in London is free of charge. People are walking on Trafalgar Square; it starts to rain, and they go into the museum. With electronic tickets for specific times, there won’t be anything of that kind.

The city intends to make it easier for people to visit. Next summer the [European] Football Championship will be upon us. There are arguments about where the fan-zone will be. We have a plan for how to impose a cultural programme during the championship within the framework of what we call the “Hermitage Forum” – the ground floor of the General Staff building, Palace Square and the passage onto the Neva embankment. We don’t know how that will work out, but there is a plan.

For all our love of football, we need to think about how to avoid the image of the capital of football supplanting the image of the cultural capital.