The Hermitage's Furry Staff

Who do you think holds an official position at the Hermitage Museum, gets veterinary care on the museum's budget, and has a personal file with a formal performance record? And has held that job for three centuries running, without a single break — through every change of power.

It started with a no-nonsense decree from Empress Elizabeth in seventeen forty-five. Nothing sentimental about it — just an order: bring thirty cats from Kazan to St. Petersburg, "the biggest and most capable." Kazan cats were famous across the empire as ratcatchers. This wasn't a whim. It was hiring policy.

But the darkest chapter came during the Siege of Leningrad. By nineteen forty-three, the cats in the city had almost disappeared. Picture the Hermitage's stone-vaulted basements, silence broken only by scurrying — without the cats, they turned into a kingdom of rats. So four trainloads of cats were shipped in from Yaroslavl and Siberia. Entire freight trains. Wartime logistics, mobilized for mousers.

Their descendants are still on the job. Every one of them has a passport, a name, a history logged in the museum's records. They're barred from the grand halls — their world is the basements and service corridors beneath the marble, open to visitors only once a year, on Hermitage Cat Day.

Three centuries — empire, revolution, war, tourists with their phones out — and the job title hasn't changed once. It might just be the most stable career in Russian history.

If you leave with more questions than you came with, that was the idea. The answers and the map live at moygid dot online.