Kunstkamera

Stand on the embankment for a moment and listen. The Neva moves past, wide and grey, and the wind off the water is often colder than you expect. Behind you rises a long building painted in a soft blue-green, trimmed in white. In the centre, a tower climbs in tiers, and at the very top sits a strange metal object. It is a sphere made of rings. Keep that sphere in mind, because it explains a great deal about this place.

This is the Kunstkamera, the first public museum in Russia. Its name comes from German and means, roughly, a cabinet of art, or a chamber of curiosities. In the early eighteenth century, rulers and scholars across Europe kept rooms like this. They filled them with shells, minerals, coins, instruments and oddities of nature. Peter the Great saw such collections on his travels in the West, and he decided that Russia needed one too.

Peter founded the collection in 1714, when his new city was still young and raw. Saint Petersburg was a capital being built on marshland, by order and by force. A museum here was part of a bigger argument. Peter wanted Russians to study the world through observation and science, not only through tradition and church teaching. This building was meant to be a classroom for a whole country.

The style you see is often called Petrine Baroque, the style of Peter's era. It mixes Dutch and German influences with Russian taste. Notice how restrained it is compared with the later palaces across the river. The decoration is flat and orderly, with pilasters, which are shallow columns set into the wall. Several architects worked on it over many years, and construction continued after Peter's death in 1725.

Now look again at the tower. In its early life, the building was not only a museum. It also housed a library and an astronomical observatory, among the first in Russia. That ring-shaped sphere on top is an armillary sphere, an old model of the heavens used to show the paths of the sun, the moon and the stars. So the tower announces the building's purpose from far away: this was a house of knowledge about the earth and the sky.

Here is something many visitors miss. Inside that tower stands an enormous globe, the Gottorp Globe. It came to Peter as a diplomatic gift from the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp in northern Germany. The outside shows the earth. The inside is hollow, and a small group of people could sit within it and watch the stars painted on its inner surface turn around them. It was, in effect, an early planetarium. A fire in 1747 badly damaged the building and the globe, and what you can see today was restored afterwards.

The heart of the early collection came from the Netherlands. Peter admired Dutch science, and he bought the famous anatomical collection of Frederik Ruysch, an Amsterdam anatomist. Ruysch had developed his own methods to preserve human and animal bodies in fluid, so that they kept their shape and colour. Peter also acquired the natural history collection of Albertus Seba, an Amsterdam apothecary. Together these purchases turned a royal hobby into a serious scientific museum.

This is the part of the Kunstkamera that people talk about long after their visit. In one hall, rows of glass jars hold preserved specimens, including human embryos and infants with severe birth defects. Peter issued decrees asking his subjects to send unusual natural specimens to the museum, instead of hiding or destroying them out of fear. His point was simple. These were not omens or the work of evil spirits. They were natural events, and science could study them. Some visitors find this hall difficult, so you may want to prepare yourself, or move through it at your own pace.

There is a well-loved story about how Peter brought people through the doors. Many Russians at the time were suspicious of a building full of skeletons and strange creatures. According to a popular tale, Peter not only let visitors in without charge, but also had them offered a drink or a small treat on arrival, to make curiosity more attractive than fear. Treat the details as legend, but the spirit of it fits him well. He wanted the public inside.

The scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, often called the father of Russian science, also has a strong connection to this building. He worked with the Academy of Sciences, which used the Kunstkamera for its research and meetings. Today a part of the museum is dedicated to his memory, with rooms that show instruments and the working world of an eighteenth century scholar. It is a quieter space, and a good contrast to the busier halls.

Today the museum carries the full name of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. It belongs to the Russian Academy of Sciences, and most of its halls are about people rather than oddities. You can walk past clothing, tools, masks, weapons and household objects from Indigenous peoples of the Americas, from Africa, from Japan, China, India and many other regions. The cases are old-fashioned, made of wood and glass, and that is part of the charm. You are seeing how earlier generations of scholars chose to show the world.

As you walk, notice how the building itself shapes the visit. Floors creak in places. Staircases are narrow, and the halls connect in long lines rather than open spaces. Light from the tall windows falls across the cases and changes with the weather outside. On a grey day the rooms feel close and serious. On a bright winter morning, light from the snow and the river fills the windows and the old glass shines.

When you step back outside, take a moment on the embankment before you move on. Across the water you can see the long facade of the Winter Palace and, a little further, the golden spire of the Admiralty. Peter's city spreads out along the river in both directions, built in stone on what was once wet ground. Behind you, the blue-green walls of the first museum still face the Neva. Look up once more at the armillary sphere on the tower... a model of the sky, placed high above a city that wanted so badly to understand the world.