A small museum in the courtyard of the Great Gostiny Dvor tells the story of the merchant estate and its role in the life of St Petersburg. It occupies a wing of 1869 built by the architect Kuzmin for the committee that ran Gostiny Dvor — that is, the office of the trade carried on here. The showcases hold family photographs of merchant families, newspapers a century and a half old with reports of their affairs, and the goods sold in the shops of the "Gostinka": thread, gloves, hats, footwear. A separate part of the display consists of finds from excavations on the grounds of the arcade itself. The neighbouring Perinnaya Line traded in down and feathers, which is where its name comes from. Next door, in the galleries, there is a house church of St Seraphim of Vyritsa: before taking monastic vows he was a Petersburg merchant and traded in furs, so the closeness to a museum of merchantry turned out to be fitting. The market building itself, the oldest commercial structure on Nevsky Prospekt, was built in the 1760s-1780s to a design by Vallin de la Mothe with the merchants' own money, and the shops later belonged to them; walking all the way round it along the galleries comes to about a kilometre.
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