State Historical Museum
From Moscowiki
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Sunday from 11:00 until 20:00
Closed: Tuesday and first Monday of the month
Moscow Museum Guide
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[edit] Description
State Historical Museum stands on the central square of Moscow beside the walls of the ancient Kremlin and is the largest national museum in Russia.
[edit] History of Museum
It was established in 1872 by public demand but under royal patronage of Alexander III. The architect Vladimir Sherwud, who won the competition for the best design, built the museum in 1881 in Pseudo-Russian style. Traditional style of decoration of the facades with 17th-century ornamentation was chosen to correspond with the ancient constructions on the Red Square. The museum halls are arranged so that the painted, carved and molded art objects represent the artistic and stylistic features of each historical epoch of Russian culture.
[edit] Interior of Museum
The Museum now contains some 5 million objects representing Russia’s multinational culture and 12 million documents charting Russian history from earliest times to the present day. Tremendous quantity of archaeological finds, historical relics and things of everyday use, tools, costumes, and works of imitative arts pertain to the history of Russia. The first impression of the interior of the Museum is majestic. Walking upstairs into gala outer entrance hall, you find marble red and white square mosaic under your feet, walls flowered in different colors on either sides of the room and a grand family tree of Russian dukes, tsars and emperors, containing 68 portraits painted on the ceiling.
[edit] Expositions
Archaeological exposition of the museum opens with the huge (about 6–7 meters in length) tusks of a mammoth attached to the wall at the height as originally in reality. Here you can also find a big black canoe, carved out of an oak trunk more than 5 thousand years ago. Many bides and peaces of jewelry, which belonged to ancient beauties, and some other 1,5 million objects made from stone, bone, clay, bronze, iron, gold and silver comprise the collection of archaeological findings. These articles cover different stages in Eurasian history: from the epoch of Paleolithic Age to early Middle Ages on the territories of Russia, Siberia, Crimea and south-Russian steppes. The rest of the exposition is devoted to the items of centralized Russian State. Numismatic collection numbers 1,7 million coins of Old Russia, antique, Eastern and Western coins as well as Russian and foreign medals. It is the largest coin collection in Russia.
The collection of personal and national seals and awarded insignia includes wax, suspended and ring-seals of Russian tsars and emperors. Amongst these there is a golden personal ring-seal of one of Ivan the Terrible’s wives, Maria.
A large collection of the early printed Russian books and ancient manuscripts contains some hand-written manuscripts, codexes, etc. The department has a special collection of Novgorodian birch-bark scrolls, which illustrate everyday correspondence between common people of ancient times. And the first published complete set of scientific works by Mikhail Lomonosov, the Great Russian scholar, is also represented at the Historical Museum.
Innumerable collections of cartographic articles (hand-drawn and printed maps, globes, atlases of the 16th–20th centuries), visual art works (paintings, prints, photographs and icons), wooden objects (which characterize urban, peasant and mansion every-day life of Russia), weapons (some samples of cold steel and defensive arms), works of art made from precious metals, fabrics and historical costumes of different epochs can be found here.
All the objects in this museum are of great historical value. You can see, for example, the brief case and the purse of the Russian Field-Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov (who won the victory over Napoleon’s conquest in 1812), or the big (about 6 meters in diameter) globe that belonged to Peter the Great in the 17th century.
[edit] Photos
