Winter Palace

Stand still for a moment and listen. Wind comes off the river Neva and moves across the open stones of Palace Square. Somewhere behind you, a tour group laughs. In front of you, a long wall of pale green and white runs further than your eye wants to follow. Columns stand in tidy rows. Gilded window frames catch the light. Along the roofline, a line of statues and urns stands against the northern sky. This is the Winter Palace, and you are standing at its front door.

First, a word about scale, because the building is designed to make you feel small. The façade stretches along the river embankment on one side and faces the square on the other. Inside, there are well over a thousand rooms. For more than a century and a half, this was the main winter residence of the Russian emperors. Today it is the heart of the State Hermitage Museum, one of the largest art collections on earth.

The palace you see is not the first one on this site. Several earlier winter palaces stood here or nearby in the decades after Peter the Great founded the city in 1703. The building in front of you was commissioned by his daughter, Empress Elizabeth. She wanted a residence that could compete with any royal house in Europe. Her architect was Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, an Italian-born designer who spent most of his career in Russia.

Rastrelli worked in the Baroque style. Baroque is the late seventeenth and eighteenth century fashion for drama, movement and rich decoration. Look at how the façade never stays flat. Columns step forward in groups, then step back. Window surrounds carry carved faces, shells and scrolls. The rhythm is designed to keep your eye moving. Construction began in the 1750s and took most of a decade. And here is the first twist in the story... Elizabeth died before she could live in it.

The palace instead became home to Catherine the Great. She was a German-born princess who took the Russian throne in 1762. Catherine was a serious collector. She bought paintings by the hundreds, often whole collections at once from across Europe. Soon there was no room for them in the residence. So she added new wings next door to hold her art. She called this private retreat her Hermitage. That name, a place of solitude, eventually passed to the whole museum.

Now for a moment that most visitors never hear about. In December 1837, a fire broke out inside the palace. It burned for days. Much of the interior was destroyed, although guards and servants carried many treasures out into the snow of the square. Emperor Nicholas the First ordered an immediate rebuilding. Architects Vasily Stasov and Alexander Bryullov led the work, and the main rooms were restored remarkably quickly. Many of the halls you walk through today date from that rebuilding, not from Rastrelli's time.

One room that survived in spirit is the great ceremonial staircase. It is often called the Jordan Staircase. The name comes from a winter ritual. Every year at the Feast of Epiphany, the imperial family walked down these steps to the frozen Neva. There, a hole was cut in the ice, and the water was blessed in memory of Christ's baptism in the river Jordan. Inside, look for white marble, gilded details and a painted ceiling high above you.

The interiors change character from room to room. One hall is lined with deep green malachite, a banded copper mineral from the Ural Mountains. Another, the Military Gallery, holds rows of portraits of generals who fought against Napoleon in 1812. Many of these portraits were painted by the British artist George Dawe. Some frames are empty, covered only with green silk. These mark officers who died before their likeness could be made. It is a quiet and moving detail.

Let us turn around and look at the square itself, because it is part of the palace's story. Opposite you stands the long, curved General Staff Building, with its triumphal arch. In the centre rises the Alexander Column, a single tall shaft of red granite topped by an angel. Here is the second surprise. The column is not fixed to its base with bolts or mortar. It stands in place under its own enormous weight.

This square has also seen tragedy. In January 1905, a peaceful crowd of workers marched toward the palace with a petition for the emperor. Troops opened fire. The day became known as Bloody Sunday, and it shook public trust in the monarchy. Twelve years later, in 1917, the palace became the seat of the Provisional Government, the short-lived authority after the fall of the tsar. In October that year, Bolshevik forces entered the building and arrested its ministers.

The twentieth century brought another hard test. During the Second World War, the city was besieged for nearly nine hundred days. Much of the Hermitage collection had been packed and sent east by train for safety. The palace itself was damaged by shelling. Museum staff stayed on, and some lived in the building's basements. After the war, the restorers returned the halls, and the paintings came home.

A small, living detail now. The Hermitage has kept cats for a very long time. They are said to guard the basements against mice, and the museum still cares for a colony of them today. You are unlikely to see them in the grand halls. But the city celebrates them, and they have become a gentle local legend. Even the colour of the walls has a history. The façade has been painted in different shades over the centuries, including a deep red-brown in the early twentieth century.

Before you go inside, take one more look at the long green wall. Count the columns if you like... you will probably lose track. Notice how the light changes on the white trim as clouds pass over the river. Every emperor, every revolutionary, every restorer who shaped this place stood on these same stones. When you walk away, turn back once from the far side of the square. The whole palace fits in your view only from there.