On 3 December 2020, the exhibition “Two Palmyras: Real and Virtual” was formally opened in the General Staff building as part of the large-scale programme for the Day of Palmyra in the Hermitage.
The main idea of the exhibition is to present the current stage in the study of Palmyra and to demonstrate the results of the most up-to-date monitoring of the state of the site that is being carried out in the hope of the reconstruction of the ancient city at some later date.
Present at the opening ceremony were Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, Natalia Feodorovna Solovyeva, Deputy Director of the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IHMC), and Maxim Borisovich Atayants, General Director of Maxim Atayants’s Architectural Studio.
The exhibition was opened by Mikhail Piotrovsky: “This exhibition is the story about the latest technical methods that combine unreal things with real models. They are one of the most remarkable museum tools and particularly beloved today. All these technical approaches and devices can be employed for the documentation and protection of all cultural sites generally, to guard them from barbarians and from incompetent restorers.”
“The exhibition is a sort of drawing of the balance of our almost five years of work in Palmyra,” Natalia Solovyeva said. “At first we were creating 3D models and did not aspire to anything more. Then we grasped that this was a step along the road to the proper, modern documentation of monuments. A data base created for a cultural heritage site preserves, allows study and even provides people who cannot visit the monument to travel. Presented on the screens are models of the whole territory of Palmyra and at the same time fragments from our geographic information system containing history, studies, the history of the building. Anyone who visits the exhibition will be able to wander around Palmyra looking at the screen, using our 3D model.”
The central part of the display is a detailed model of the territory of ancient Palmyra on a scale of 1:300 made by 3D printing on the basis of photogrammetric scanning carried out by specialists from the IHMC and the Geoscan company.
You can find the digital model on the special website https://palmyra-3d.online.
The exhibition also features one more high-precision model – a detailed recreation of the Temple of Bel that was destroyed in 2015. The temple has been made on a scale of 1:33 and it presents the famous edifice in two states – in the condition on the eve of the destruction in 2015 and as a complete reconstruction.
While the exhibition is running, the art object An Element of the Decoration of the Temple of Bel has been installed on Bolshaya Morskaya Street beneath the Arch of the General Staff building (the appearance of which was inspired by one of Palmyra’s edifices – the Arch of Triumph). The piece is an exact, full-size copy made by the Vozrozhdenie group of companies from natural Dolomite limestone of one of the capitals that topped the pilasters of the Temple of Bel. It measures 1.9 × 1.9 × 1.1 metres and weighs around 7.5 tonnes.
The display is supplemented by exhibits that show the changing state of Palmyra over the last 250 years – items relating to the architecture of ancient Palmyra and to the 2016 and 2019 expeditions, as well as a series of photographs for comparison. In this way, the exhibition not only presents cutting-edge technologies and the very latest methods in the preservation of cultural treasures, but also acquaints visitors with the actual process of international work in Palmyra.
Ivan Vasilyevich Korneyev, Head of the State Hermitage’s Historical and Informational Service, has responsibility for the exhibition.
