At first, it is not exactly clear what we are supposed to feel so privileged
about. We have been bundled into a car and driven for half an hour through
grim, Soviet-era suburbs, to reach a mysterious fortified warehouse in the
Staraya Derevnya district on the outskirts of St Petersburg.
The scene feels straight out of a James Bond movie. %26ldquo;If we go in there, we
might never come out,%26rdquo; my wife, Hennie, half jokes. Cameras are banned and
even my notebook raises eyebrows as a guard with a scary face punches
electronic codes into bleeping keypads causing steel doors to rise.
However, what lies beyond will leave us spellbound.
The Hermitage storerooms, which opened in 2003, brim with treasures amassed by
the tsars that few get to see. The glittering gold coronation coach of
Catherine the Great is the centrepiece of a fleet of imperial carriages and
sedan chairs parked in a cinema-sized hall. In the vault housing diplomatic
gifts, we enter a woven cashmere tent filled with bejewelled urns and
oriental rugs, presented by the Ottoman Sultan Selim III, then gaze at a
phantasmagorical giant garuda bird from Indonesia. Half a million paintings
are arranged on hundreds of electrically operated carousel racks and
labelled only with reference numbers. There are chambers filled with enough
Roman and Hellenic statues to take on the Qin dynasty Terracotta Army, plus
vast repositories of French and English furniture, and collections of coins
and medals running into millions.
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