July 30, 2014. A subsidiary of the State Hermitage Museum might open in Yekaterinburg soon. On July 29, Head of Yekaterinburg Council Alexander Yakob met the Hermitage representatives to talk about Russia’s largest museum’s arrival in the Urals’ capital.

According to the city council’s press service, Head of Yekaterinburg Council Culture Department Tatiana Yaroshevskaya and Director of Yekaterinburg Fine Arts Museum Nikita Korytin took part in the meeting as well. The State Hermitage Museum’s team comprised Deputy Director-General Alexei Bogdanov and Deputy Head of the West-European Fine Art Department Mikhail Dedinkin.

Incidentally, it was in Yekaterinburg where the world-famous masterpieces were evacuated for safekeeping from the Hermitage during the Great Patriotic War. The collections were kept at Sverdlovsk Art Gallery. The first train with the exhibits arrived safely in town on July 9, 1941. The second echelon left Leningrad (as it then was) on July 20; the train’s twenty-three carriages contained 1,422 boxes with some 700,000 exhibits. All the evacuated collections were placed within the art gallery as well as in the church and the basements of the Ipatiev Estate.

‘All the masterpieces went back to Leningrad in October 1945. To thank the gallery for saving its treasures, the Hermitage presented Sverdlovsk Art Gallery with 27 canvasses, 5 sculptures, and 84 pieces of furniture, porcelain and bronze exhibits in 1946 and 1949,’ the city council says.