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Hermitage Heist an Inside Job
// Museum employees suspected in disappearance of exhibits worth $5 million
Jewelry with a total value of more than $5 million has disappeared from the repositories of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The loss was discovered yesterday during an internal audit. The statement issued by the museum concerning the situation indicates that museum employees were likely involved in the disappearance of the pieces. A criminal investigation is underway.
The Hermitage press service reported that 221 pieces were missing from the repository where Russian jewelry is kept. Most of the pieces were cloisonné dating from the 15th to 18th centuries. The museum itself is calling the disappearance a robbery, but museum spokesmen are not specifying exactly what pieces are missing or how just a theft was possible. A more complete statement by museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky is expected today.
“Russian enamel is unique in the history of art,” St. Petersburg collector Andrey Ananov told Kommersant. “In the West, cloisonné has been known for no more than 200 years, but it has been produced in Russia since the 15th century. There was a rich collection of enamel in the Hermitage – icon settings, baskets, cups.”
The value of the missing pieces has been officially placed at over $5 million (130 million rubles). The auction price of the pieces could be considerably higher. Museum employees were unable to give even a loose estimate of that sum since the pieces have never been displayed abroad and their insurance value is undefined.
An anonymous museum employee told Kommersant that the inventory of the museum's holding has been going on since the autumn of last year. In November of last year, the keeper of Russian jewelry died at her desk. The cause of her death is still unknown.
Andrey Tsyganov
All the Article in Russian as of Aug. 01, 2006
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