Hermitage

The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg: What the Collection Is and What Visiting Means Right Now

The State Hermitage Museum holds more than three million works of art spread across six connected buildings on the south bank of the River Neva in central St Petersburg. By exhibition floor space (over 233,000 square metres), it is the largest art museum in the world. The collection began in 1764 when Catherine the Great purchased 225 Old Masters from a Berlin merchant, partly to furnish the Winter Palace and partly, according to her own letters, out of a combination of genuine hunger for art and competitive vanity. That tension between imperial display and genuine connoisseurship shaped everything the Hermitage became.

The Travel Advisory Reality

Before anything else about logistics: as of mid-2026, the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and most EU governments maintain their highest-level travel advisories against visiting Russia. The US State Department’s Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory cites the ongoing armed conflict with Ukraine, the risk of arbitrary detention of foreign nationals (including for social media posts or associations deemed anti-Russian by authorities), and severely limited consular support. The UK Foreign Office advises against all travel to Russia and specifically flags an increased risk of British nationals being detained. Western bank cards do not function in Russia; direct flights from western Europe and North America remain largely suspended. St Petersburg has recorded multiple air raid alerts since December 2025.

Visitors from countries with fewer formal restrictions, including many from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, continue to arrive, and the museum itself remains open with an active 2026 exhibition programme. This entry describes what the Hermitage is and how it works for those who are able and choose to visit. The decision about whether to travel is one each visitor must make against current official guidance from their own government.

The Collection: What Is Actually Here

The scope is genuinely difficult to communicate. The Winter Palace alone has over 1,000 rooms. On any given day, visitors see perhaps 2 to 3 percent of what the museum owns. The practical approach is to focus on specific galleries rather than attempting comprehensive coverage.

The main complex holds the Old Masters: Rembrandt’s “Danaë” and “Return of the Prodigal Son,” Leonardo’s “Benois Madonna” and “Madonna Litta,” a Raphael, and works by Titian, El Greco, Caravaggio, and Rubens. The “Danaë” survived a 1985 acid attack by a disturbed visitor; the restoration took twelve years and the damage, subtle but visible under close inspection, is present in the finished painting. Most visitors walk past without knowing the painting’s history.

The General Staff Building across Palace Square houses the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections acquired largely by two Russian merchants, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, in the early twentieth century. They bought Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh at a point when these artists were not yet considered canonical. After the 1917 Revolution, both collectors fled Russia and their collections were nationalised. What they assembled is now among the finest Impressionist holdings anywhere in the world, superior in scope to most western European museum collections of this period. The Shchukin and Morozov collections were hidden from the public for decades under Soviet rule and only partially revealed in the 1950s, a fact that sits oddly given what they represent. The General Staff Building also displays the Faberge collection and a permanent Art Nouveau section.

The 2026 exhibition programme includes “Urbi et Orbi: Baroque Rome and Ancient Rome,” a new permanent display of Scythian gold from the Black Sea steppe, and “Catherine I,” which opened in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace in May 2026.

Tickets and Entry

Museum entry for foreign visitors costs 700 to 800 roubles per person (approximately 7 to 8 euros at mid-2026 exchange rates, though accessing that rate without a functioning western bank card involves its own complications). Children and students enter free; admission for all visitors is free on four specific dates each year: 23 February, 8 March (International Women’s Day), 18 May (International Museum Day), and 7 December (Saint Catherine’s Day). Those days are extremely busy. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10:30am to 6pm, with late closing on Wednesdays and Fridays until 9pm. Mondays are closed.

The timed entry system organises visits into 30-minute entry windows, with each session allocated roughly two hours in the galleries. Booking in advance through the Hermitage website (hermitagemuseum.org) is advisable. Online tickets are released for a rolling window of one to four weeks ahead. Allow a minimum of four hours for the main complex; a full day is not excessive if you plan to cover the General Staff Building as well.

What Else to See in St Petersburg

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, has an interior of floor-to-ceiling mosaic extraordinary in its density and craftsmanship. It is operationally independent of the Hermitage and has its own ticketing. Peterhof Palace, the eighteenth-century summer residence with formal gardens and more than 150 fountains, is 30 kilometres west and reachable by hydrofoil from the Hermitage pier during summer months. Catherine Palace at Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo), about 25 kilometres south, houses the reconstructed Amber Room; the original was looted and destroyed by retreating German forces in 1941, and the restored version, completed by Russian and German craftsmen over 25 years, opened in 2003.

Staying Near the Hermitage

The Hotel Astoria on St Isaac’s Square has stood since 1912 and occupies one of the most dramatically located positions in the city, facing St Isaac’s Cathedral with the Bronze Horseman a short walk away. It survived the 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad partly because Hitler had already printed banquet invitations for a victory celebration he planned to hold there; the building’s symbolic value was apparently too great to bomb.

The Four Seasons Hotel Lion Palace occupies a nineteenth-century palazzo on Voznesensky Prospekt, about ten minutes’ walk from the Hermitage, and represents the upper end of the city’s accommodation.

For more modest budgets, the area around Vladimirskaya metro station, southeast of the city centre, has numerous well-reviewed guesthouses and small hotels within reasonable distance of the main sights.

Eating in St Petersburg

Café Palkin on Nevsky Prospekt is the oldest restaurant in the city, with origins in the eighteenth century. The current building dates from the nineteenth century and the menu covers Russian classics with a degree of formality; expect 2,000 to 4,000 roubles per person for a full meal. Dom Beat in the Petrogradsky neighbourhood offers contemporary Russian cooking with a shorter, seasonally changing menu. For a quick lunch near the museum, the ground-floor café inside the General Staff Building serves acceptable food in a convenient location.

A Practical Note on Navigation

The Hermitage is genuinely enormous and signage, though improved, remains inconsistent. The museum publishes suggested walking routes on its website and a printed map is available at the entrance. Without a plan, first-time visitors often find themselves having covered the same ground twice or having missed entire sections. Download the route suggestions before you arrive. The audio guide, available in several languages including English, is worth the additional cost.

The collection of Scythian gold from burial mounds on the Black Sea steppe, assembled from excavations beginning in the eighteenth century under Peter the Great’s direction, is one of the least discussed but most remarkable parts of the museum. Peter issued one of the world’s first heritage protection orders specifically to prevent the looting of those burial mounds, which is a striking piece of eighteenth-century policy that has almost no profile in standard histories of conservation. Most visitors spend their time on European paintings and never reach the Scythian galleries. They are worth finding.