PETER THE GREAT MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY (KUNSTKAMMER)

3 Universitetskaya naberezhnaya 199034 St. Petersburg
Open: 11am - 4.45pm
Closed: Mondays and the last Tuesday of every month
Tel. 328-1412,328-0118
Nearest metro station: Vasileostrovskaya

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.