In the city of Murmansk, quite a lot of interesting sights are concentrated, preserving a part of the centuries-old history of this climate-severe place. In order to see and feel the whole path of development of the city from its very foundation to the days of our time, it is worth visiting one of the largest museums rich in exhibits.
This article will present the Murmansk Regional Museum of Local Lore. A description of some of the many exhibits will be briefly presented below.
general information
More than 100 thousand people visit this museum of local lore. It has magnificent exposition halls, which today number 17.
In it, the visitor is presented with the entire centuries-old history of the great land from the most ancient times to the present. The halls of the museum introduce unique conservation areas.
Numerous exhibits of the museum demonstrate the specifics of the diversified economy of the region, associated mainly with the use of natural resources, which are rich in these regions.
How did it all start?
The Murmansk Regional Museum of Local Lore, created in 1926 under the Society for the Study of the Murmansk Territory, is one of the oldest in the region.
It all started with a tiny boardwalk on Leningradskaya Street, which housed five hundred exhibits. They were prepared by the Director of the Biological Station of Murmansk, Professor G. A. Kluge, together with his staff, Professor A. A. Polkanov and agronomist I. G. Eichfeld. They represented, respectively, marine fauna, minerals and plants.
M.N. Mikhailov was the first director of the museum.
Today's Murmansk Regional Museum of Local Lore: photo, development history, general description
The exhibits of the modern museum are located in a completely new building - a bright large building on Lenin Avenue. This building is a historical monument of the Murmansk region, built in 1937 as a typical secondary school. Subsequently, in 1941, the hospital was located here.
Since 1957, the first expositions appeared here. Today, the museum funds contain about 140 thousand units in storage, including 25 thousand exhibited.
Since 1965, a mosaic panel appeared on the front side of the building, and an anchor on the pedestal, like a monument to the world's first icebreaker called Ermak.
Exhibits
It is worth visiting the Murmansk Regional Museum of Local Lore . Murmansk will become more interesting and closer if it is better to learn its entire history.
Visitors have the opportunity to see one of the most unique collections of rocks extracted from the bowels of the earth (from depths up to 12 kilometers) while drilling an ultra-deep Kola well (in the Guinness Book of Records). Also presented here is the splendor of a variety of minerals. It is worth noting that of the 3 thousand minerals known in the world, 930 are registered on the Kola Peninsula, 200 of which were discovered for the first time.
Against the background of the excellent panorama of the northern forest, you can see cubs with a bear and a calf with a moose on the forest edge. Also, everyone who visits the museum can make sure that the tundra, despite its harsh conditions, is the place of growth of rare and amazing plants. Here are flowers that "live" under the snow.
The tundra is the habitat of many birds (for example, the polar tern - the world record holder in terms of flight range) and the deer’s home. The exposition also presents amazing inhabitants of the depths of the Barents Sea.
Having acquainted with the exhibits of the museum, each visitor can feel and imagine the vulnerability and fragility of the immense northern nature and understand the need for careful attitude to it.
It is impossible in one article to cover and present the entire exposition, which is represented by the Murmansk Regional Museum of Local Lore.
Expositions about the activities of local residents
The traditional occupations of people living in the Kola North go back centuries. This is fishing, reindeer herding and hunting. The first historically known peoples who once inhabited the Kola Peninsula in antiquity are the Sami. To find out how they looked and how they lived, you need to visit the archeology department, which presents the rarest exhibit - a sculptural portrait of an ancient man, reconstructed by an anthropologist M. M. Gerasimov.
As early as 1556, the city of Kola was erected on the sandbank of the Kola Bay , which was the most important fishing and administrative center of this region. Then it became the first trading port, a border outpost in the North of Russia.
The Murmansk Regional Museum of Local Lore promotes the expansion of knowledge of young people and schoolchildren about the development of their native land and contributes to the emergence of a feeling of love for their homeland.
Here visitors can see how the fishing and mining and chemical industries, the electric power industry and the oil and gas industry of the region developed.
About the events taking place in this region during the revolution and during the Second World War, about the harsh living conditions in the Arctic, about the fate of people and so on. tell the halls of the museum.
The exposition is also the personal belongings of Yu. Gagarin, who once served in the Arctic.
Be sure to visit the Murmansk Regional Museum of Local Lore. His address: Murmansk, etc. Lenin, house 90.
Features
- The museum is famous for its famous diorama imitating the aurora (the visiting card of the region).
- The exhibit of the section "Nature" is the only exposition of the bottom of the sea in Russia - a dry aquarium.
- The bird market diorama imitates the voices and singing of various birds.
- The museum presents interiors of dwellings (Middle Ages - XX century). There are 7 of them.
- The museum presents curious archaeological artifacts, household items and tools of the Sami and Pomors, models of ancient architectural structures, ships and ships, and samples of a wide variety of military equipment.
The Murmansk Regional Museum of Local Lore is original and rich in its exposition, covering a wide variety of areas.
Conclusion
The merit of the museum is not only in the display of unique exhibits. Every six months, informative scientific and practical conferences are held at the museum. And also annually in its halls more than 50 local history exhibitions are organized.
In addition to all of the above, the museum’s library is one of the oldest in the region, with about 18 thousand journals and books on local history.