VIDEO: I Am Three-Blooded – I Have Russian, Armenian, and Polish Blood: Piotrovsky

The First Channel of Russia has produced a documentary film about Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum, who turns 75 on December 9.

Part of the filming for the documentary, titled “The Guardian,” took place in Yerevan, where the renowned academic was born in 1944. Piotrovsky showcased his birthplace in old Yerevan in the film. He shared details about his family, which has had several representatives from the intellectual elite.

The channel's crew strolled along Northern Avenue in Armenia’s capital, adjacent to the Opera Theater, with Piotrovsky. “My Armenian name was Mikhail. I have been registered in Russia’s topographical registry under that exotic name. Since it’s the same as Mikhail, they translated it,” Piotrovsky explained.

The director of the Hermitage showed the house where he was born and where now stands the bust of his father, the prominent archaeologist Boris Piotrovsky.

“I am three-blooded; I have Russian, Armenian, and Polish blood. My ethnicity is clear – a hereditary Russian noble with three bloodlines. For this reason, when I am here, I am a Russian ‘chauvinist,’ when I am in Russia, I am an Armenian and Polish ‘chauvinist,’ and when I am in Poland, I am a Russian and Armenian ‘chauvinist,’” Piotrovsky stated.

Mikhail Piotrovsky met with Ruben Vardanyan, a Russian businessman of Armenian descent, in the center of Yerevan, who congratulated the academic on receiving the title of Honorary Citizen of Yerevan. The documentary also includes footage of the award ceremony.