Travelers with Astronomy’s solar eclipse expedition to Russia last summer saw a spectacular range of Russian churches and museums. The grandest of them all was St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, one of the greatest museums in the world. One of the nearly endless rooms in the Hermitage is the Malachite Room, world famous as one of the most richly decorated mineral rooms in existence. Designed by the architect Alexander Briullov in 1830, the space was the official drawing room of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of Czar Nicholas I. Prior to its use as a museum, the building housing the Malachite Room was known as the Winter Palace.
Columns, tables, vases, and many decorative elements of the room were carved of Russian malachite, a hydrated copper carbonate mineral, the copper giving it a rich green color. During several months in 1917 the Provisional Russian Government met in the Malachite Room.