Hermitage cats Hermitage cats The Hermitage cats () are a group of cats residing in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The museum has a press secretary dedicated to the cats, and three people act as caretakers. The cats live in the museum's basement, and they also appear on the embankment and on the square during the summer. In previous eras they roamed throughout the museum galleries. In 2010, Maria Khaltunen (also "Khaltunin" or "Haltunen"), who directs the museum's cat programme, stated that there were 60 cats on the museum grounds, even though the staff has a joke that officially the
Egyptian Collection of the Hermitage Museum Alexei Norov from Theban Necropolis of the Eleventh dynasty of Egypt in the 1830s, was moved from the Imperial Academy of Arts to the Hermitage. Some items were purchased for the museum from antiquities traders in Egypt and collections of Russian merchants or received as gifts. In 1862 the collection expanded significantly, as the Castiglione collection, which was purchased by the Imperial Academy of Sciences from Carlo Ottavio Castiglione in Milan in 1826 and consisted of more than 900 items, core of the Egyptian museum of the Kunstkamera, was transferred to the Hermitage. However, there were no Egyptologists in Russia