The story
In Saint Petersburg's Central Naval Museum stands a small sailing boat that Russians call the grandfather of the Russian fleet. The young Peter the Great found it in a storehouse near Moscow in 1688 and learned to sail in it, and his idea of a navy grew from there. The museum traces back to Peter as well. It began as his Model Chamber, a store of ship models and drawings at the Admiralty, first mentioned in 1709.
For seven decades the collection filled the old Stock Exchange on the tip of Vasilyevsky Island, where it moved on the eve of the Second World War. In 2013 it moved again, to the restored Kryukov Barracks, built for sailors beside the Kryukov Canal. Its full name now honours Emperor Peter the Great.
Alongside ship models, navigational instruments, trophies and the marine throne of Catherine the Great, the museum keeps a large group of sea paintings by Ivan Aivazovsky, who was appointed painter to the Navy's Main Staff in 1844. Among his canvases here is the Battle of Sinope, the 1853 Russian victory over a Turkish squadron, painted the same year. Another, the Review of the Black Sea Fleet in 1849, shows a parade on the Sevastopol roadstead that Aivazovsky watched beside Emperor Nicholas I and painted almost 40 years later, in 1886.
