The history and art museum-reserve of Sergiyev Posad (the Museum, for short) is one of the largest repositories of Russian art (the Konny Dvor Museum Preserve is a part of it and located in the area adjacent to the Monastery). The location of the Museum endows it with uniqueness: it is situated within the walls of the ancient Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius (the Lavra, for short). This monastery was founded in the early 1340s by a son of a boyar from Rostov, Sergey (Sergius) Radonezhsky, and would later become one of the richest Russian monasteries. The world-famous architectural ensemble includes over 50 buildings by masters from Moscow, Pskov and Yaroslavl and is an integral part of the museum-reserve complex. In 1993, the ensemble was included in the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites.
The Museum was founded in 1920 on the basis of art treasures of the Lavra. Thanks to this, the unique collections were saved from ruin and survived the troubled times. The holdings of the Museum are based on art valuables collected by the Lavra during many centuries: some of the valuables came in the form of donations from grand and local princes, tsars, boyars, clergy and common people, some were produced at workshops of the Lavra. This way a rich and extremely varied collection of ancient (the 14th – 17th century) Russian works of pictorial and applied art was created. 17th century inventory books have been preserved till the present days. These are the inventory of 1641 and the donation books of 1639 and 1673 giving us invaluable information about the collection items and their creators.
Later other collections became integrated into the holdings of the museum, namely, the collection of the local museum of regional studies (1929) and the collection of the museum of folk artistic crafts (1941).
At present the holdings of the museum contain above 120,000 items including ancient icons, medieval manuscripts, books printed with an ancient (pre-Petrine) Cyrillic alphabet, works of pictorial and ornamental embroidery, church plate, gold and silver products, works of pictorial, graphic, folk and contemporary decorative and applied art. The permanent true interest towards this most ancient art collection of Russia is based on its intimate relation with the most important events in the history of the Russian people: the Battle of Kulikovo (1380), the struggle against the Polish-Lithuanian invaders during the Time of Troubles (the early 17th century) as well as the events of the times of Peter the Great.
The State Hermitage Museum occupies six impressive buildings situated along the embankment of the Neva River in the heart of St. Petersburg. The leading role in this unique architectural complex formed in 18th and 19th centuries belongs to the Winter Palace — the residence of Russian Tsars — built in 1754–1762 upon the project of F. B. Rastrelli.
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The Museum of Wooden Architecture and Peasant Life (the Museum, for short) spread out on the right, high bank of the Kamenka River. In old times, its location was occupied by St. Dmitry's Monastery founded in the 11th century by a monk of the Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra, Yefrem. The ensemble of this open-air museum consists of 18th and 19th century woo...