The Hermitage St Petersburg

Catherine the Great started the Hermitage by buying 225 paintings she did not particularly want. In 1764, a Berlin merchant named Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky had accumulated a collection of artworks to sell to Frederick the Great of Prussia. Frederick’s finances collapsed before the deal closed, and Catherine, newly consolidated on the Russian throne and alert to any opportunity to signal cultural authority, bought the lot. She kept acquiring at a pace that alarmed her advisers. By the end of her reign she had amassed over 4,000 paintings, plus manuscripts, gems, scientific instruments, and the personal libraries of Diderot and Voltaire. What began as opportunistic purchasing became one of the most aggressive cultural acquisition campaigns in European history.

The result is today one of the largest and most significant art museums in the world. The main complex on Palace Square comprises five interconnected buildings including the Winter Palace, where the last Romanov tsars lived. The collection now runs to over three million items, most of which are in storage at any given time. You could walk 24 kilometres following every corridor and passage through the main complex alone.

Visiting in 2026: Practical Realities

Russia’s position after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine has fundamentally changed the logistics of visiting St. Petersburg for most Western travellers. Citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, EU member states, Canada, and Australia now face significantly more complex visa processes than before; many require an e-Visa which can be applied for online and takes several days to process. Western presence in Russia has dropped sharply; the tourist population now skews heavily toward visitors from China, Southeast Asia, Iran, and other countries with closer Russia relationships. You should check current advice from your government before making any bookings.

Payment is the other major practical issue. International Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards do not function in Russia due to sanctions. Booking.com and Airbnb have suspended Russian operations. Bring rubles, sourced before arrival or at exchange offices upon landing. In the Winter Palace courtyard, ticket offices and self-service machines take cash and accept both ruble and card payments from Russian-issued cards. For foreigners using cash, the entrance fee runs around 700 to 800 rubles for the main complex, which at current exchange rates makes this among the most affordable world-class museums anywhere.

The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, closed on Mondays. Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday hours extend to 20:00 (last admission at 18:00), while Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday close at 18:00 (last admission at 16:00). The museum is also closed on 1 January and 9 May (Victory Day).

To avoid queues, which can be long in summer, arrive at opening time or in the final two hours before close. Midweek mornings are consistently quieter than weekends. Tickets are sold in 30-minute entry slots.

The Collection

The Winter Palace state rooms are the first thing that stops most visitors entirely. The Jordan Staircase, with its columns, ceiling fresco, and gilded railings, is more like the interior of an opera house than a corridor. It was built in the 18th century and was the main ceremonial entrance for foreign ambassadors. The sequence of state rooms beyond it, including the Malachite Room clad entirely in green malachite from the Ural Mountains, reflects tsarist ambition to stun visitors into understanding Russia’s power.

The painting collection covers Dutch and Flemish masters (the Rembrandt hall is among the strongest concentrations of his work in any single institution), Italian Renaissance, French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist rooms with a dozen Matisses and a strong Picasso grouping, and Spanish masters including two of the most significant Velazquez works outside Spain. Catherine bought much of this systematically: Pierre Crozat’s French collection in 1772, Robert Walpole’s English collection in 1779, and dozens of individual works from Diderot and other agents she employed across Europe.

The Scythian gold collection in the basement rooms is one of the most undervisited sections of the museum and arguably the most remarkable. Goldworking of extraordinary technical sophistication, produced by nomadic peoples of the Central Asian steppe between the 7th and 3rd centuries BCE. Drinking vessels, horse harnesses, and decorative plaques that show detailed animal combat scenes. Most Western visitors walk past the signage and never find it. That is the crowd-dodge alternative: skip the Rembrandt hall during peak hours, go to the Scythian gold, and return to Dutch masters closer to closing.

The museum publishes a map and suggested one-day, two-day, and three-day routes on its website. A two-day visit is the minimum that allows you to see the main collections without feeling like a forced march. The General Staff Building across Palace Square from the Winter Palace holds the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection and is a separate visit with a separate ticket. It is less crowded than the main complex and the Matisse rooms are exceptional.

St. Petersburg Beyond the Hermitage

The Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, a 10-minute walk from Palace Square, is a genuinely extraordinary building: a Russian Orthodox church built on the site where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, its interior covered in over 7,000 square metres of mosaic. The canals surrounding it give it the appearance of floating. Lines to enter are shorter in the evening.

The Russian Museum on Arts Square holds the national collection of Russian painting and sculpture and is one of the best collections of Russian art assembled in a single space. It receives far fewer foreign tourists than the Hermitage and the rooms are consistently calm. The collection runs from medieval icons through 18th-century portraiture to the major movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Repin and the Wanderers, and a strong representation of Russian avant-garde work.

Nevsky Prospekt, the main boulevard, runs 4.5 kilometres from the Alexander Nevsky Monastery to the Admiralty building. Walking its full length and eating or drinking at intervals covers most of the city’s commercial and architectural diversity in a few hours.

Eating and Staying

The Grand Hotel Europe on Mikhailovskaya Street has been the dominant luxury address in central St. Petersburg for over 150 years. The cafe inside the hotel is a reasonable place for a mid-morning break. For something more local in character, the canteen-style stolovaya restaurants scattered around the city offer traditional Russian food (borscht, pelmeni, salads) at prices that are extremely low even accounting for the exchange rate. Teplo on Bolshaya Morskaya is a cosy restaurant with home-style Russian cooking that consistently attracts local diners over tourists.

For accommodation, ZenHotels and Ostrovok are the platforms that work for international bookings; standard international platforms do not function. Apartments around Konyushennaya Square, within walking distance of the Hermitage, offer practical space for a multi-day stay.

The Hermitage is most effectively visited at least twice during any stay in St. Petersburg. The first visit orients you. The second, with a specific route in mind, is the one you remember.