The State Hermitage Informs:
To the Issue of the Cathedral of the Winter Palace

In connection with the announcement of the Interfax Agency the State Hermitage would like to inform that the Museum Authorities know nothing about the letter of the Hermitage staff to Patriarch Kirill. The figure 400 seems strange, taking into consideration that the museum staff consists of about 2000 people.

As for research assistant of the Hermitage Mikhail Anikin, then for the last years he has been mainly busy with the lawsuit with Dan Brown whom he accuses of theft of an idea for the bestseller The Da Vinci Code.

Concerning the substantive issue itself, the State Hermitage for many years has been sequentially reconstructed interior of the Winter Palace. This list also includes the Cathedral of the winter Palace, about which book The Cathedral of the Winter Palace by S. Yanchenko was published in 2009. Recently the Committee for Permanent Expositions of the Hermitage has discussed the plans of reconstruction of the Cathedral's interiors in particular. It seems practical to reconstruct the icon screen and it is discussed whether it is necessary to reconstruct the interior of the specific historic epoch or to exhibit a part of the ancient icons from the Hermitage collection in special icon-cases.

In due course there was reached an agreement with Director of the National Pushkin Museum Sergey Nekrasov to place a memorial tablet in the Cathedral with initial lines from Derzhavin's Ode God which the poet wrote right after coming back from the service in the Cathedral of the Winter Palace.

As far as service conduction is concerned then many years ago and agreement was achieved with Metropolitan John that only services on special occasions should be conducted in the Cathedral of the Winter Palace, in particular, a special service on the Day of Enemy Exile out of the Borders of Russia. Let's remind that the Cathedral is located next to the Military Gallery of 1812.