| Name: |
Peter the Great Museum
of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkammer) |
| |
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| Address: |
3 Universitetskaya naberezhnaya
(metro station: Vasileostrovskaya) |
| Phone: |
+7 (812) 328-2502 |
| Open: |
Open: 11am - 4.45pm
Closed: Mondays and the last Tuesday of every month |
| Description: |
: The Kunstkammer, or Cabinet
of Curiosities, is one of the world's oldest ethnographic
museums. It was opened in 1714 by decree of Peter I and became
the first Russian public museum. It was first housed in the
Summer Palace, then in the Kikin Chambers. In 1727 it was
finally moved to a building on the spit of Vasilevsky Island,
which was specially constructed for the collection between
1718-34. (Begun by Georg Johann Mattarnovy, completed by Nikolaus
Herbel, Gaetano Chiaveri and Mikhail Zemtsov and restored
after the fire of 1747 by Sabbas Chevakinsky). An example
of Petrine Baroque, the Kunstkammer is one of the few architectural
monuments to have survived from the first quarter of the eighteenth
century.
The nucleus of the museum was made up of Peter Fs personal
collections. In 1724 the Kunstkammer was given to the St.
Petersburg Academy of Sciences and, in the 1830s, seven independent
museums were formed under its auspices. In 1879, two of them
- the Museum of Ethnography and the Museum of Anatomy - were
merged to create the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
which was named after its founder, Peter the Great, in 1902.
The museum's ethnographic, anthropological and archaeological
collections reflect the culture and everyday life of many
of the world's peoples. It houses an early anatomical collection
(bought in 1717 from the Dutch anatomist Fredrik Ruysch),
a collection of monsters from Peter's Kunstkammer, and a wide
variety of artefacts assembled in the 18th and 19th centuries
during the Siberian and Kamchatka expeditions led by the scholars
Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt, Gerard Friedrich Miller, Peter
Pallas, Johann Georg Gmelin and Stepan Krasheninnikov. The
museum also owns a vast amount of ethnographic material brought
back from Ivan Krusenstern's and Yuri Lisiansky's round-the-world
voyages on board the ships Nadezhda and Neva and from Faddei
Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev's Antarctic expedition.
Of particular interest is the collection amassed by the celebrated
Russian scholar and traveller, Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai, in
New Guinea and Polynesia.
The museum's exhibition traces the history of the origin of
man and the human race, and dwells on the principal phases
in the evolution of primitive society and the cultural traditions
of various peoples. There are unique specimens of the minor
arts from Japan, China, Polynesia and Australia, as well as
models of dwellings, original domestic utensils and samples
of handicrafts and materials reflecting the notions and beliefs
of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Australiasia, North and South
America, Kamchatka and the Far East. The permanent display
"From the Collection of the First Russian Museum - the
St.Petersburg Kunstkammer" presents the first museum
holdings from the collection of Peter I along with his personal
belongings, a plaster copy of his death mask and a mould from
the impression of his hand. |
