DEAREST LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!

After such a long period of the so called "unpunished" living it is high time to make an announcement about our existence. Leaving aside a number of reasons for our being inconspicuous, we are, at last, glad to congratulate US: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!

Website of museum - gallery "The New Hermitage " has made its appearance in the year of SNAKE, in the NEW CENTURY, in the NEW MILLENIUM!

It is not accidentally. Since the old days the snake has been considered as the symbol of wisdom and health, had magic properties and miraculous force. However, as you know, just to be wise is not enough - one needs to know how to use it, meaning to be able to link the causes and the effects, to give answers to WHY?-questions, revealing the accidental, to discover the regular and to find out the beginnings and ends in the a chain of events. It is not philosophy but reality, since museum-gallery "The New Hermitage" does not resign itself to the will of crowd, but determines the direction ...

Nowadays the original meaning of the French word "hermitage", that of "a place where a hermit lives", "a place of seclusion ", has sunken into oblivion. Today's Hermitage differs greatly from the quiet part of the Imperial Palace, created by efforts of Catharine II in the 18th century. The Petersburg New Hermitage was opened later, in 1852. And though it was named the Public Museum, a year after its opening Nickolas I ordered "to distribute tickets to the Imperial Hermitage and its galleries not through the chiefs of the Hermitage departments but through the Court office ". All visitors were to be entered into a special book. There was no room for a large number of visitors of the museum in the corridor leading to the main entrance lobby. In the internal part of the tambour there was a device with ten balls moving along the wire arc (something like an abacus) intended for counting museum visitors. The door attendant, watching the visitors through a glass screen could count them in tens!

Ah, what a pity, that "the times are not chosen, in them we live and die"! The remarkable traditions of the past are almost lost today. And this "almost" is not accidental.

Moscow museum - gallery "The New Hermitage" has made an attempt to revive the traditions of the Imperial Palace, which have passed into oblivion, to revive the original meaning of the word "hermitage".