The Arabian Hall, sometimes known as the Blackamoor Hall or the Arabian Dining Room, is one of the semi-private rooms of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. In the Tsarist era, it was the room from which imperial processions through the state rooms began. The double doors were designed to be on a straight axis through the principal state rooms and ultimately the Jordan Staircase, forming an enfilade. Thus it was here the Romanov family often assembled, in private, before state receptions and occasions. The privacy of the room was not compromised by the small private courtyard (see plan) from which windows, which once led to the Tsaritsa's winter-garden below, admitted light.
Designed by Alexander Briullov following the Winter Palace fire of 1837, the room is decorated in the neoclassical style fashionable in the early 19th century, known as Pompeian. A ceiling, with a low segmental barrel vault with bands of shallow coffering stuccoed with classical motifs, is seemingly supported by a colonnade of engaged fluted Greek Doric columns with enriched echinus molding and no bases. A Greek key fret enriches the entablature that runs without a break round the room. The only furnishings were the dining chairs of Greek klismos type, formally ranged round the walls. When the Imperial family were to dine here, dining tables would be brought in, covered and laid, then removed afterwards.
The various geographically confused names of the Arabian Hall derive, not from any peculiar contents, but from the four official pseudo-bodyguards of the Tsar who travelled from palace to palace with the Imperial family. They were four "massive Negroes" fantastically dressed in scarlet trousers, gold jackets, white turbans and curved shoes. Wherever the Tsar was, they guarded the doors between the private and official world. They had no other function other than to open and close doors; their sudden, but silent appearance into a room was the signal that heralded the immediate appearance of the Tsar or Tsaritsa.
Although the guards were referred to as the Ethiopians or Blackamoors, from 1896, at least one was an American. Jim Hercules holidayed in the USA and always returned with jars of guava jelly for the Imperial children.
Today, the empty hall is occasionally used for special exhibitions held by the State Hermitage Museum.
Famous quotes containing the words arabian, hall, winter and/or palace:
“O animal excellence,
Take pterodactyl flight
Fire-winged into the air
And find your lair
With cunning sense
On some Arabian bight....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too—unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child’s trouble.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)
“The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)