Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
• Our tour of the core collection is finished. If you'd like, detour downstairs to rooms
101-109, which are reserved for special exhibitions.
• To see the palatial rooms on the top floor, return to the main wing of the palace (go back
downstairs and down the long hall, then continue down the even longer hall—marked
To
Mikhailovsky Palace
) and head up the grand staircase to the second floor.
Early Russian Art
• Once upstairs, turn left, making a quick circle through rooms 1-17.
Rooms 1-4:
These rooms house Russian icons, the earliest dating back to the 1100s.
Icons are a key part of Orthodox traditions of worship, and have roots in medieval Greek
and Byzantine artistic styles.
Rooms 5-12:
You'll find the grandest architecture in the museum in these rooms over-
looking the gardens out back, along with mostly 18th-century portraits.
Rooms 13-17:
These rooms cover the Romantic era of the early 19th century. In room
16, tucked in among more exotic Mediterranean destinations, are some small, easily missed
views of St. Petersburg by Sylvester Shchedrin.
The Russian Orthodox Church
In the fourth century
A.D.
, the Roman Empire split in half, dividing Eastern Europe
and the Balkan Peninsula down the middle. Seven centuries later, with the Great
Schism, the Christian faith diverged along similar lines, into two separate branches:
Roman Catholicism in the west (based in Rome and including most of Western and
Central Europe), and Eastern or Byzantine Orthodoxy in the east (based in Con-
stantinople—today's Istanbul—and prevalent in Russia, far-eastern Europe, the east-
ern half of the Balkan Peninsula, and Greece). The root
orthos
is Greek for “right
belief”—and it seems logical that if you've already got it right, you're more conser-
vative and resistant to change.
Over the centuries, the Catholic Church shed old traditions and developed new
ones. Meanwhile, the Eastern Orthodox Church—which remained consolidated under
the stable and wealthy Byzantine Empire—stayed true to the earliest traditions of
the Christian faith. In the mid-15th century, Russia's branch of Orthodoxy officially
split from Constantinople, moving its religious capital to Moscow. And today, rather
than having one centralized headquarters (such as the Vatican for Catholicism), the
Eastern Orthodox Church is divided into about a dozen regional, autocephalous (“self-
headed”) branches that remain administratively independent even as they share many
of the same rituals. The largest of these (with about half of the world's 300 million
Orthodox Christians) is the Russian Orthodox Church.
The doctrines of Catholic and Orthodox churches remain very similar, but many
of the rituals and customs are different. For example, in Orthodox churches that are
active houses of worship, women are expected to cover their heads; churches that are
