On 26 May 2015, the State Hermitage held a Day of Yemen, the aim of which was to draw attention to the cultural, historical and artistic heritage of Yemen and to remind the worldwide public of a cultural tragedy – the barbaric destruction of historical monuments in the Middle East.
From the 26 to 29 May 2016, an exhibition of Syrian and Yemeni antiquities from the stocks of the Hermitage will be held in the Foyer of the Hermitage Theatre. It includes a gravestone and a protective tablet with South Arabian inscriptions from the 7th–5th centuries BC, an inlaid bronze tray created in the 14th century by Egyptian craftsmen to a commission from the Yemeni Rasulid dynasty, silver jewellery and a dagger made by Yemeni craftsmen in the 20th century. The exhibition also features artefacts from Christian and Muslim Syria – icons, silverware, bronzes and ceramics with Christian subjects and glass goblets of the Mameluke era.
The Council Hall of the State Hermitage was the venue for a scholarly meeting with presentations by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, on “Something new about Christians, Jews and Elephants in pre-Islamic Arabia. Christian Robin’s Discoveries in Najran”; Leonid Kogan, head of the Department of the History and Philology of the Ancient East in the Institute of Eastern Cultures and Antiquity at the Russian Sate University of the Humanities (Moscow) on “A unique Ethiopian-Arabic glossary from the Rasulid Anthology (14th c.)” and Sergei Frantsuzov, head of the Department of the Near and Middle East in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts Russian Academy of Sciences (St Petersburg) on “Pre-Islamic epigraphy in the Nihm region (North-Eastern Yemen).”.
In the evening a programme “The Day of Yemen, In Memory of Lost Monuments” was held in the Hermitage Theatre. It opened with a welcoming address by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage. A talk by Yefim Rezvan, Deputy Director of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, was followed by a showing of the film The Expedition about the celebrated Soviet-Yemeni multidisciplinary expedition. The evening ended with a theatricalized composition “Riddles of the Queen of the Morning” devoted to the Queen of Sheba and based on texts from the Bible, Talmudic midrashim and Arabic legends, the works of Flaubert, Mirra Lokhvitskaya, Igor Severyanin, Viacheslav Ivanov, W.B. Yeats and Konstantin Balmont. Ivan Krasko, People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, and Yulia Kobzar, soloist of the Mariinsky Theatre ballet, participated in the production by Sergei Kargin.
