Astrakhan Local History Museum

Astrakhan Museum-Reserve is one of the oldest provincial museums in Russia. Now it has 14 branches in Astrakhan and the region. The largest of them is the Local History Museum.

On December 12, 1837, by the decision of the Governor I.S. Timiryazev, the Provincial Museum was opened. In 1862, due to lack of funds for maintenance, the museum was closed, and the exhibits were transferred for storage to other institutions. But thanks to the active activity of the Petrovsky Society of Researchers of the Astrakhan Territory, on March 5, 1897, the official opening of the Astrakhan Petrovsky Museum took place. In 1911, its expositions were placed in the new building of the City Institutions, where they are now located.

In the local history museum on a permanent basis exhibits: “Living past of the Earth”, “Fishes of the Volga-Caspian basin”, “Astrakhan region in the XIX-XX centuries”, “History and culture of the peoples of the Astrakhan region”, “Nature of the Astrakhan region” and “Astrakhan region in antiquity”, as well as exclusive exhibitions “Armoury room” and “Gold of nomads”.

The collection of the museum has more than 300,000 items of storage. The most famous are housed in the archaeological collection, which contains unique gold and silver products of the Savromatian-Sarmatian times, the Golden Horde period. There is a numismatic collection, a collection of documents, an ethnographic collection, a collection of cult objects, collections of applied art products, natural science and paleontological collections, etc.