St Petersburg Hermitage Museum to open branch in Yekaterinburg

A branch of Russia’s State Hermitage Museum is set to open in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg in 2016, following an agreement signed by Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky, Sverdlovsk regional governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev and the head of Yekaterinburg’s administration Alexander Yakob earlier this month. The new museum will be the third regional branch of the Hermitage to open in Russia, after those in Kazan and Vyborg.

Details over the future of the Hermitage-Ural centre were discussed at the International Conference of Museums, which was held in St Petersburg and then Yekaterinburg in September.

The plan to create a branch of St Petersburg’s largest museum in Yekaterinburg was inspired by the city’s role in the history of the Hermitage. More than a million artefacts from the Hermitage’s museum collection was sent to the Ural capital in 1941, where they remained in safe keeping at the city’s Sverdlovsk Picture Gallery until the end of the Second World War in 1945.

The idea of opening a fourth branch of the Hermitage in the Siberian city of Omsk was also discussed at the conference.