At the Alexandrovskaya Sloboda Museum-Reserve the exhibition "What the Palaces Keep Silent About" has opened. It concludes a series of museum events timed to the 510th anniversary of the Alexandrov Kremlin and the town. The vivid life of the medieval Sloboda—the oprichnina capital—over five centuries has accumulated many fabrications, but the most famous ones are nevertheless rooted in real facts. The new project tells about the most interesting of them: the autocrat's oprichnina domain, the fate of his liberia (royal robes) and treasury, unusual foreign gifts, whimsical military games, and the entanglements of the sovereign's family life.
More than 200 rare items of medieval domestic life from the museum's collections (about 20 of them on display for the first time) and from the private collection of Moscow collector S.A. Afonin are presented in two halls. These artifacts recount the everyday life of the sovereign's court in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda.
Five centuries have passed, yet the Sloboda palaces still "tell" true stories about the first Russian tsar, his crowned parents, all the tsar's spouses and their royal sons. They all lived here for long periods—in this palace town remote from the capital. In the Alexandrov Kremlin each family member had their own chambers: the tsar's halls, the tsarina's terem, the rooms of the tsareviches and their wives. Expressive images of that distant era at the exhibition are very accurately complemented by paintings by Elena and Nikolai Komarov (St. Petersburg). Especially for the new museum project, the artists created canvases in the style of Byzantine iconography and Old Russian miniatures.
Thanks to the unusual project of the Museum of Ivan the Terrible, the former grandeur of the palace Sloboda—the "uncrowned" capital of Russia—comes alive again in emblematic episodes of history, shrouded in centuries-old legends.
The exhibition will be on view from 28 November to 26 February. Guided tours can be arranged.
