Hermitage‑Ural Cultural and Educational Center

About museum

The exhibition-and-memorial building of the Hermitage‑Ural Center is located in merchant Bardygin’s house, built in 1912. The building is a cultural heritage site and was transferred to the Sverdlovsk Art Gallery in 1936. It became the main storage site for the State Hermitage’s collections during the Great Patriotic War (World War II), which shaped the subsequent reconstruction concept: all three floors are in one way or another connected with the Hermitage, either exhibition-wise or historically. The first floor houses a hall for temporary exhibitions from the State Hermitage; the second floor contains a permanent exhibition of Western European art objects, most of which were donated by the Hermitage to the Sverdlovsk Art Gallery (since 1988 — the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts) in gratitude for preserving its collections during the war. A memorial area dedicated to the events of the evacuation period is being created on the third floor. The junction of the annex roof and the historic building at the third-floor level made it possible to place the lecture space “Art Attic” here — right in the middle of the rafter system, whose original construction may well be what made this building an architectural monument.