Peter the Great’s Zertsalo

Timed to celebrate Peter the Great’s 350-year jubilee, the exhibition features a unique and newly restored zertsalo from the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.

Zertsalo is a historic artefact, a three-sided prism crowned with a two-headed eagle, and bearing copies of Peter’s three most important edicts on civil service. It was designed as an object to symbolize the power of law, and to be kept at every governmental office throughout Russia, a tradition that had been observed until the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.