The Traditional Charity Reception in the Winter Palace

On 26 June 2021, the traditional charity reception took place in the Winter Palace.

This year it was held in a special format that accorded with the current arrangements for visiting the Hermitage: compulsory wearing of masks, preliminary testing of guests and museum staff for COVID-19, measuring people’s temperature on entering, a restricted number of participants who also had to move around the museum in small groups keeping strictly to particular routes.

The special programme began with a preview of the Flora project. The director Jacqueline Kornmüller and producer Peter Wolff presented to those attending the charity evening three scenes from a literary mystery play that will have its full premiere in the autumn. While watching the scenes, the groups of invited guests moved exclusively in one direction and maintained safe distancing. Museum staff were on duty in the halls where the performances took place, helping the guests to follow the route and reminding them of the need to keep to public health guidelines.

The donors, partners, sponsors and friends of the Hermitage visited the new temporary exhibitions “Arts of the Middle Ages. Masterpieces from the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria” and “Alexander Nevsky, Prince and Saint: Imagery and Symbolism”, as well as the latest – “Transfigurations. African masks of the 19th and 20th centuries”, which opened the day before. Since all these exhibitions are housed in large halls in the Winter Palace and Small Hermitage, the guests were able to avoid crossing each other’s paths and to view the exhibits while keeping their distance. The reception ended in the Pergamon Hall of the Small Hermitage to the accompaniment of acoustic jazz.

The donations collected will go to the State Hermitage's endowment fund, the income from which is used to expand the museum's collections.