On 10 November 2020, the exhibition Iron Age – Europe without Borders opened at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition presents approximately 1,600 objects from the 1st millennium BC from an area stretching from the Atlantic and the Urals to the Caucasus, reflecting the cultural development of this epoch in a pan-European context. The focus is on some 750 objects from the collection of the Berlin Museum of Pre- and Early History that were brought to the Soviet Union as a result of the Second World War.
With the onset of perestroika, the indications that numerous objects believed to have been lost forever might have survived in Russian museums grew, and eventually the rumours proved to be true. In 1996, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow showed the exhibition The Treasure of Troy, and in 1998 the Hermitage and the Berlin Museum of Pre- and Early History founded their cooperation with the exhibition Schliemann – Petersburg – Troy.
It was quickly recognised that only cooperation between the museums of the two countries could lead to further reidentification of objects. One of the most important steps in the German–Russian cooperation was the exhibition Merovingian Period – Europe without Borders, for which the Berlin Museum and the Hermitage partnered with the Pushkin Museum and the Moscow State Historical Museum. The exhibition, which was shown in Moscow and St Petersburg in 2007-2008, set a trend of scientific collaboration between experts from German and Russian museums. A new chapter of cultural cooperation had been opened and it has continued to prove its significance with Bronze Age – Europe without Borders: 4th-1st millennium BC in 2013-2014 and the current Iron Age exhibitions.
