St Petersburg Museums on a Monday: What's Closed and Where to Go

The Hermitage is closed on Mondays. So are the General Staff Building across the square, the Winter Palace of Peter I and the Kunstkamera. If your trip to St Petersburg includes a Monday, half the standard must-see list disappears before breakfast.

The other half is open, and it is unusually empty. There is no single closing day in this city: every museum picks its own. Here is the map.

Closed on Monday

• Hermitage, Main Museum Complex — closed Mondays, plus 1 January and 9 May. Wed, Thu, Sun 11:00–18:00; Tue, Fri, Sat 11:00–20:00. Timed entry; ticket desks shut an hour before the museum.
• General Staff Building — same schedule, same Monday closure. The Impressionist floors are not a workaround.
• Winter Palace of Peter I — Tue–Sun 12:00–18:00, guided sessions only.
• Kunstkamera — Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, last entry 17:00. Closed Mondays and on the last Tuesday of each month.
• Gatchina Palace (suburb) — closed Mondays. The Priory Palace is closed Monday and Tuesday.

Open on Monday

• Russian Museum — the Mikhailovsky Palace runs 10:00–20:00; the Mikhailovsky Castle, Stroganov Palace and Marble Palace 10:00–19:00. Their day off is Tuesday.
• St Isaac's Cathedral and the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood — both 10:00–18:00, ticket desks until 17:30. Their day off is Wednesday.
• Peter and Paul Fortress — exhibitions close on Wednesdays, so Monday is a normal day. The island itself is open 06:00–20:30, the area inside the walls 09:50–19:30.
• Fabergé Museum — open every day, 10:00–20:45, ticket desk 9:30–20:15. No weekly closure at all.
• Erarta, the contemporary art museum — 11:00–23:00, closed Tuesdays. Main ticket 1500 ₽; 990 ₽ ages 16–21, 900 ₽ over 60, 600 ₽ ages 4–15.
• Yusupov Palace on the Moika — daily, palace 10:00–19:30, entry and ticket desk 09:30–18:00.
• Zoological Museum — 11:00–19:00, last entry 18:00, closed Tuesdays. It stands a hundred metres from the shuttered Kunstkamera, which makes it the obvious Monday substitute.
• Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo — 10:00–18:00, ticket desk until 16:45, closed Tuesdays. Parks open daily 7:00–21:00.

The trap is the sanitary day

Russian museums close one extra day beyond the weekly schedule for cleaning and maintenance. It is tied to an ordinal weekday, not a fixed date, and online aggregators almost never show it.

• Kunstkamera — last Tuesday of the month. In October 2026 that is 20 October. From 21 October to 8 November it then runs with no days off at all, 10:00–18:00.
• Catherine Palace — last Monday of the month, but only from November to March.
• Zoological Museum — second Wednesday, 1 September to 1 May.
• St Isaac's colonnade — third Wednesday, 1 October to 30 April; open daily the rest of the year.
• Gatchina Palace — publishes the whole year in advance: in 2026 it includes 6 October, 10 November and 1 December.

Check the museum's own «Режим работы» page, not a map app. One useful exception works the other way: the St Isaac's museum keeps all its sites open with no days off during school holidays (except summer) and public holidays.

How to plan around it

Place the Hermitage and Kunstkamera on any day but Monday, the Russian Museum on any day but Tuesday, St Isaac's, the Savior on Spilled Blood and the fortress on any day but Wednesday. Give Monday to palace interiors, the Russian Museum and the fortress ramparts — the «Nevskaya Panorama» wall walk runs 10:00–19:00 with no days off. Close the evening at Erarta, open until 23:00 when everything else has shut; other late options are listed in our guide to museums open until 9 pm. If the door turns out to be locked anyway, see what to do when a museum is closed, and for interiors by appointment, how to get inside Petersburg mansions.

Cover photo: GAlexandrova · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Викисклад