The Hermitage Museum Church on Spilled Blood, St Petersburg | Russia #3

Today it’s cloudy, it looks like it’s going to rain. So, perfect day to visit churches and museums. We’re starting by visiting the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood.

This church is famous for the mosaics, in fact 750 square meters of mosaics. Beautiful!

These are not paintings

The Hermitage is the second largest museum in the world, only after the Louvre. It’s a museum of art and culture, it was founded in 1754 which makes it one of the oldest in the world too.

A mistake that many people make here is stay in line.

There are hundreds of people waiting in line to buy the ticket. And you can just buy tickets at the machines.

They are basically empty the whole time and then you just go straight through.

The museum is so big that you can easily get lost, so the best thing to do is to either get an audio guide it’s paid in here, or you download the audio guide from the museum’s app. And there various tours you can choose from.

We chose the three hour tour. But if you want you can spend the whole day here.

Here they offer 15 minutes of free wi-fi, so it’s perfect time for you to download the app. If you haven’t done it yet.

The collection is spread throughout multiple buildings, we entered from the Winter Palace, which was the official residency of Russian tsars between the 1700’s and 1917 when Russia became communist. That’s an attraction by itself.

This room here is dedicated to the founder of St. Petersburg, Peter the Great. He never lived here, though.

It all started as a private collection by Catherine the Great, a Russian monarch. In 1764 she purchased her first paintings. And look what it became.

Look at how hard it is to get close to a Da Vinci painting.

This is an interesting artwork by Michelangelo. To start with it’s the only Michelangelo artwork in Russia, but what’s funny about it’s because it was commissioned by an Italian family and they decided not paying it in the end so he said, “okay, then I’m not finishing it”.

And you can clearly see, his feet are unfinished.

An entire gallery dedicated to the Russian victory over Napoleon when he tried to invade Russia.

They have artwork from ancient civilizations and all art movements throughout history. Our three hour tour turned into five and we still didn’t see everything.

In St. Petersburg there are over 500 bridges, 90 rivers and canals over 300 kilometers of waters; no wonder it’s considered the Venice of the North.

You gotta do boat tours here, we’re going for another.

There are tours in English too but very few and their schedule didn’t match our schedule. So that’s how we ended up in a Russian tour.

Of course it was beautiful, you see the canals, the constructions everything from a different angle, but I think it would have been interesting to understand.

Got any questions about St. Petersburg? Then get in touch.