The Hermitage guide

The collections of the Numismatic Department are well known throughout the Soviet Union and abroad. They include mint cabinets containing classical, Byzantine, Oriental, Western European, and Russian coins; a cabinet for medals and orders; three repositories of which one contains specimens reflecting the 1500-year history of Western European coinage; a collection of numismatic antiquities; and, finally, a library, the best in the country, totalling more than 200,000 volumes on numismatics, sphragistics, heraldry, and genealogy. In all, the Department houses 1,100,000 items, many of which are on display on the third floor of the Winter Palace.

The exact date of the foundation of the collection is unknown, but it is traditionally considered to be 1771, when the M. Bremsen collection was purchased. Documentary evidence shows that a number of important acquisitions were subsequently made, and these, together with the M. Bremsen collection, formed the nucleus of a Münzkabinett (mint cabinet). As was often the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mint cabinet was attached to the library, and its first keeper A. Luzhkov held the post of librarian.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Hermitage collection totalled over 15,000 coins. The mint cabinet changed places several times and in 1852 its collections were assembled in two rooms on the second floor of the New Hermitage — the present-day Armorial Hall and a corner room with two tiers of windows. The latter room, decorated with medallion-shaped reliefs on the walls, was called the Medal Room and, later, the Coin Room. Special mahogany showcases for coins can still be seen in the Department’s exhibition halls. Coin- and medal-cases were kept on the upper gallery where the numismatists worked. The Department occupied these premises for almost a century, until June 1941.

In 1864 the Münzkabinett was formed into an independent section of coins and medals. At this time the collections totalled about 100,000 examples of numismatic art. By 1917 the number of items had increased to over a quarter of a million. During the Soviet period the numismatic stocks of the Hermitage have grown more than fourfold. From the very beginning entire collections and individual rare coins were acquired for the Münzkabinett both at home and abroad. Suffice it to mention the J. Reichel collection; its 5,000 items of Russian origin were bought by the Hermitage in 1851, and the remaining 40,000 coins and medals mainly of Western European provenance came to the Museum at a later date. The C. Thieme collection, purchased in 1906 in Leipzig, contained 33,000 copper coins, token money and counters, and the collection of the Pskov merchant F. Pliushkin, bought in 1914, comprised 38,000 coins, ingots and several hoards of coins. In 1918 the Hermitage acquired about 2,000 Byzantine coins from the heiress of the well-known collector I. Tolstoy. The Museum was also given very generous donations. Thus, the widow of Academician V. Velyaminov-Zernov presented the Hermitage with 18,000 Oriental coins; in 1917 Academician I. Tolstoy donated his father’s marvellous collection of Russian coins, and in 1928 Academician S. Platonov handed over to the Hermitage a gold medallion of Constantine the Great (A.D. 306—337), found in a trench on the Southwest Front in 1916. Several years ago, a large number of coins, medals and badges were transferred to the Hermitage by Academician B. Bykhovsky.