Mineralogical Museum of Perm State University

Mineralogical Museum of the Department of Mineralogy and Petrography of Perm University was founded in 1916. The first head of the museum was privat-docent of St. Petersburg University A.A. Polkanov, (future laureate and academician), sent to Perm. The museum fund was started by personal collections of university staff and teachers, as well as rather curious acquisitions from private individuals and the Ural Society of Natural History Lovers. At that time, the museum got such exhibits as the fragments of the Ohan meteorite, which exploded in broad daylight in 1887 so that the roar was heard in Perm; the ashes of the eruption of Vesuvius in 1906; a coin depicting Vittorio Emmanuel II, the first king of united Italy, crushed as a souvenir into the lava of the same Vesuvius, and many other rarities.

The largest were the collections of senior assistant of the Department of Mineralogy geologist M.A. Pavlov; L.I. Kryzhanovsky, a famous mineralogist and collector; A.K. Denisov-Uralsky, famous in the early XX century stonecutter and painter, collector and connoisseur of Ural gemstone. An important moment in the history of the museum was the International Geological Congress (MGK-17) in 1937, when the improvement and expansion of the museum was carried out with the funds allocated by the government, new showcases were purchased, two of which, made of oak, have survived to the present time. They were restored in 2016 to the 100th anniversary of the Perm University, when the Mineralogical Museum, after a long period of reconstruction, actually reopened in a new building of the geological faculty. Currently, the Mineralogical Museum is the most complete collection in the Perm region of minerals, rocks and ores of the Urals, Eurasia and the whole world, including rocks of Antarctica and iron-manganese nodules from the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. For more than a hundred years, samples of the Mineralogical Museum were collected. As always, the museum fund is replenished with gifts from graduates of the Perm University, which have both scientific and aesthetic value. The Mineralogical Museum is the custodian of the history of geological science embodied in its stone expositions, and in this sense it serves as an effective brand of the University of Perm. Human life is fleeting, and acquaintance with the world of minerals brings us to the beautiful and eternal.