Location: Ulica Vorovskogo 54
Tel. 8622 642 326
Open: 9am- 6pm Tue- Sun
Entrance Fee: Adult R70, Children R40
Camera R50, Video R150
The Museum of the History of the resort city of Sochi (until 1980
- local history) is a cultural and educational institution, the main
local history museum of the city of Sochi, Krasnodar Territory,
Russia.
The building was built in 1936, it housed a school,
then - the Children's Library. N. A. Ostrovsky.
The museum
was founded on July 9, 1920 as the Sochi Museum of Local Lore. It
was based on the collection of exhibits of the Sochi branch of the
Caucasian Mountain Club. From January 1932 the museum was housed in
the Public Assembly Building.
There are more than 80 thousand
historical items in the museum funds. Its exposition area is 654, 4
square meters. m. The museum has exhibitions: "Archaeological
monuments of the Sochi region", "Nature of the Western Caucasus",
"Cosmonauts in Sochi". The museum includes: a department - the
Dacha-Museum of V. V. Barsova, a department - the Museum "Estate of
the Black Sea Shapsug" and a branch - the View Tower on Mount
Battery.
The origin of the museum
The basis for the creation of the museum
was the collection of the Sochi branch of the Caucasian Mountain Club,
which existed in the suburbs of Sochi from 1902 to 1917. Club members
studied the flora and fauna of the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus,
archeology, and the life of the indigenous population. This club was
headed by the famous engineer and local historian Vasily Konstantinovich
Konstantinov, who built the road to Krasnaya Polyana and was engaged in
the design of roads leading to the surrounding villages: Plastunskoye,
Azhek, Aibga. The collection of the mountain club was housed in the
house of his mother Ekaterina Pavlovna Maykova. The collection included
samples of minerals, herbariums, household items of the peoples of the
Caucasus.
After the death of VK Konstantinov and his mother (in
1920), the collection of the mountain club becomes the property of the
state. On July 9, 1920, the Sochi District Executive Committee decides
to establish a local history museum. The museum received its first
visitors on February 15, 1921. He was then in a private house, on the
site of which the Primorskaya Hotel was later built. The collection of
funds consisted of about 1 thousand items, there was its own library of
local history literature. During the first year of its existence, the
museum received 712 visitors.
Museum in the 20-40s
From the
mid-1920s until 1932, the museum experienced great difficulties, there
was no permanent premises, the collections were in boxes, it was
necessary to move or temporarily expand the exposition. Only in 1932 the
museum was given a building on the street. Ordzhonikidze, 29, where he
spent more than 60 years.
During the Great Patriotic War, the
museum became an important social and political center of the city. In
the summer of 1942, when the city of Sochi became a front-line city, the
exhibits of the museum were evacuated deep into the mountains, some were
buried in caves. When the threat of occupation passed, the museum again
restored the exposition and was open to visitors. Over the years of the
war, the museum's funds received more than 3,000 items of museum
significance, telling about the participation of Sochi residents in
hostilities at the fronts and their selfless work in the city's
hospitals. Museum staff conducted tours for the wounded soldiers, and
went to hospitals with lectures to the seriously ill. During the Great
Patriotic War, the museum served more than 45,000 visitors.
post-war period
In the post-war period, the activities of the museum
fully complied with the state policy in the field of museum business.
New expositions were built, the funds were replenished with unique
exhibits, excursions and public events were held, trips to the rural
areas of the Kuban were carried out.
A new form of work has also
appeared: they began to accept exhibitions from museums in other cities
- Tbilisi, Krasnodar, Maikop, Kaluga, Sukhumi, etc. In 1986, the museum
included new objects located in separate buildings: the Museum "Dacha of
the singer V. Barsova" and the Ethnographic department of the museum in
the village of Lazarevskoye.
The latest period. Moving to a new
building
The building that originally housed the museum on the
street. Ordzhonikidze, was built in 1910, and by the end of the 1980s it
was completely outdated and did not meet standard museum standards. It
was planned to build a new museum building, the construction of which
began in 1992 next to the old building on Ordzhonikidze Street at the
expense of the investor. After some time, construction was stopped due
to lack of funding. Soon the designing and then the construction of a
new building of the Chernomorye sanatorium began. At the end of 1999,
house number 29 on the street. Ordzhonikidze was demolished.
In
2000, the museum was moved to another building, completely losing the
permanent exhibition. The employees were faced with the task of not only
developing a new concept for a stationary exhibition, but also
reconstructing a building that was not adapted for a museum institution.
This building is located at st. Vorovskogo, 54/11, erected in 1936,
during the first general reconstruction of Sochi - the Matsesta resort
as a general education school and reflects the style features of Sochi
architectural structures of that period of time. Details of
architectural plasticity, a symmetrical solution, slender proportions of
the Corinthian colonnade and Ionic pseudo-columns characterize the
neoclassical style, to which this building can be attributed. Such
structures constituted the architectural background of the development
and the appearance of Sochi in the 1930s, which has now been lost.
That is why in 2000, when the Museum of the History of the resort
city of Sochi was transferred to other premises, this building was
transferred to it, which, due to its architectural features,
corresponded to the functional purpose of the museum, its conceptual
foundations and museological guidelines.