Cossack homestead of the late 19th — early 20th century

About museum

The Cossack homestead of the late 19th — early 20th century is one of the sites of the M. A. Sholokhov Museum-Reserve and is part of the Kruzhilinsky memorial-historical complex. Here visitors can experience the everyday life of the Upper Don Cossacks, so vividly and colorfully described in M. A. Sholokhov's novel 'And Quiet Flows the Don'. The homestead recreates a kuren (Cossack hut) with a kitchen, an icehouse, a barn, a stable, a livestock pen, a chicken coop, and antique agricultural implements: a bukar plow, a lobogreika mower, a harrow, and a threshing stone. Horses, bulls, cows, sheep, goats, and poultry also live here. Visitors can take part in household chores, feed the poultry, milk a cow, stoke the oven, churn butter in a butter churn, bake pancakes, and sample homemade treats: kholodets (meat jelly), fried eggs on lard, pishki with honey, and the famous Don vzvar (a traditional boiled fruit drink). In addition, every autumn the literary-ethnographic festival 'Kruzhilinsky Toloki' takes place here, during which visitors can see reenactments of old Cossack rituals.