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People > Photos > Gallery: Galina Subacheva > Album: Irkutsk > Angara Embankment: Museum of Regional Studies
Angara Embankment: Museum of Regional Studies

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Date: 05/19/05

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ancient botanical branch building carving construction corner daily deer dome east ed fire flat horses houses huge library magnificent members museum oldest precious project rich stone unique wall

At the corner of Gagarin Boulevard and Karl Marx Street (Ulitsa Karla Marksa) there is the Irkutsk Museum of Regional Studies, the oldest of its kind in Eastern Siberia, which celebrated its bicentenary in December 1982. The side fa栤e of this original Moorish-style building is crowned with the dome of Siberia’s first observatory. This museum is associated with the name of Academician Erik Laksman (1737—1796) who worked in Eastern Siberia between 1781 and 1791 and made the magnificent mineralogical, archeological and botanical collections which formed the base of the museum’s first exhibitions when it opened in 1782. In the 1840s a special building was designed for the museum which shortly afterwards became the property of the Siberian (later Eastern Siberian) branch of the Russian Geographical Society, a major scientific body of Russia whose members were highly respected scientists. The museum contained the examples of primitive man’s weapons and utensils, a vast collection of minerals, unique herbaria, stuffed animals and birds, old manuscripts, the logbooks of geographical and geological expeditions, examples of clothing of various epochs and handicrafts. Unfortunately, all these precious items perished during the terrible fire of 1879. To mark the museum’s centenary in 1882 a project design was approved and construction begun on a new building which now houses the museum. The construction work on the entire ensemble with a separate library building, and exhibition halls added on later lasted from 1883 to 1891. All the country’s museums, including those in Siberia, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and amateur collectors worked tremendously hard to rebuild the collections of this museum. And in 1898 as one of the finest repositories of Russia it provided items for Russia’s display at the World Exhibition in Paris. In the museum to the left of the door by the wall stands the Deer Stone, a slab of reddish-brown granite over 2,500 years with ancient carvings of Siberian stags on both its flat surfaces. Slabs of this kind were usually erected by the graves of a most rich and famous. The Deer Stone was brought to Irkutsk in the end of the 19th century from the area to the east of Lake Baikal. On its front there are carvings of seven deer of various sizes and of two small horses with circles overhead symbolizing the sun. On its narrow sides there is a carving of the weapon which primitive man used out hunting. The stone is over two metres high and over a meter wide. The museum’s halls are, as it were, miniatures of the life of Siberia from the prehistoric age to the present. You will find collections objects from the daily life and work of primitive man of the palaeolitic and neolithic ages; very rare, carved figures over 30,000 years old, a nomads yurta made of wild animals skins, a Buryat settler’s wodden yurta, weapons, portraits of the first conquerors and discoverers of Siberia, its researchers and heroes of the movment of liberation in 18th- and 19th-century Russia who were exiled to this bleak area by the tsarist regime. A large section is devoted to the huge constructions of the second half of the 20th century which have transformed the vast expanses of Siberia.