Today I went to the Kunstkamera - the first museum founded in the city, by Peter himself. If I remember correctly, it was free in Peter's day and he even offered refreshments to patrons as an incentive to visit and learn. By virtue of my Russian student card, it was free for me too (take that German tourists!).
It's not your average museum. Peter was into oddities, he collected any weird and unusual thing he could get his hands on. And all of these specimens were put on display in the Hall of Monsters (what it's called, to this day). Here you'll find stuffed two-headed calves, the skeleton of a giant, drawings of court dwarfs and an obscene number of misshapen fetuses in jars.
Here is a very blurry picture of another cool exhibit - all of the teeth Peter personally extracted from subjects while learning dentistry:
(To the right of the tooth-rack, you can also see a head in a jar.) For me, the strangest part wasn't so much seeing the unborn and multi-limbed, as the fact that each of the display cases with human parts also contained one taxidermied exotic animal. Here are some fetuses with a sea turtle:
Peter offered monetary rewards for any citizen who would bring an unusual or rare specimen of the natural world for his museum. In doing so, he hoped to wean his subjects off superstitious beliefs, that they would see how diverse and unusual creation is. It's only fitting that he contribute something himself. Below, a plaster of his face, taken after death:
The museum isn't limited to the Hall of Monsters - there's also a whirlwind tour of exotic peoples and tribes. I felt a touch of stolen pride when I came across the Iroquois display...
...complete with a small placard about lacrosse...
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