| 19 June
2009 Hermitage Amsterdam open Russian President Dmitry Medvedev joined the Dutch royal family Friday on the 19th of June to inaugurate the only branch of the Russian state Hermitage Museum in the West. President Medvedev and his wife Svetlana, Queen Beatrix, Prince Willem-Alexander and princess Maxima viewed the exhibition at the 325-year-old building on the bank of the Amstel River in Amsterdam, a former nursing home that underwent a euro 40 million ($55 million) renovation over the last two years. The Hermitage loaned 1,800 items from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg worth about euro4.5 million ($6.27 million) for a six-month exhibition in Amsterdam displaying the elegance of the 18th- and 19th-century czarist court. The museum is open to the public from Saturday 20 June. The first weekend more than 18.000 people visited the new museum. For more information about the design, see Voor more information about the Hermitage, see |
 
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