Kunstkamera (ETW building)
| Kunstkamera | |
|---|---|
| Category: | Culture |
| Level: | 4 |
| Turns to build: | 8 |
| Building cost: | 10000 |
| |
This huge collection of natural curiosities and rarities is intended to educate and inform.
The museum was the idea of Peter the Great, and was built facing his magnificent Winter Palace in the purpose-built “window on the west” of St. Petersburg. The collection has a morbid, even prurient air to it, as it features a huge number of “natural curiosities” in the form of human and animal foetuses and still-births, all carefully preserved so that their details can be studied. The point, however, wasn’t simply to collect odd items for the sake of collecting oddities. Peter the Great wished to debunk the superstitions and fears of Russia which, even though he was the tsar, he regarded as backwards and ignorant.
He had little interest in collecting man-made objects, unlike the hunters and collectors of antiquities at other great museums of the time. Major collections of minerals, rocks and scientific instruments were added to the Kunstkamera (a word derived from Dutch). The museum survived as a single collection for around a century, then its collections were despatched to a variety of Imperial museums.
Unique building to: 
This building can only be built in the faction capital.