Demidov Dacha Museum

About museum

The building is the city's only example of a private country estate from the first half of the 19th century, originally constructed in the Neoclassical style with elements of Neo-Gothic and later supplemented, after reconstruction in the last third of the 19th century, with elements of the Neo-Russian style. The area where the building stands is marked as 'Matildino Suburb' on the 1843 "General Plan of the Nizhny Tagil settlement" by E. Berje and A. Allori. The design took advantage of the site's topography: from the road side the dacha appears single-storey, while from the other three sides it has two storeys. The estate's construction is associated with the prominent Russian engineer, inventor, organizer and production reformer Foti Ilyich Shvetsov (1805–1855), who built it for himself. The dacha's second owner was Pavel Pavlovich Demidov (1839–1885), Prince of San Donato, and it became known for many years as the 'Demidov Dacha'. In Soviet times the dacha was handed over to railway workers. At various times it housed the Komsomol committee, a holiday home, a railway technical school, a park for railway workers, a children's playground, a pumping station, a sports base, sports sections of the 'Lokomotiv' society, and the city tennis court. The building was renovated in 2013. The exhibition is based on facts from the history of the Demidov Dacha. On the first floor visitors can see the interior of a mid-19th-century mining engineer's study. Nearby, in a small hall, there is an exhibition on the development history of the Demidov Dacha. On the second floor there is a large presentation hall, the so-called 'Demidov Hall'. Its exhibition presents the Demidov family of mining-industrialists, who made a huge contribution to the development of industry and culture in the Urals and Russia. The Demidov Dacha Museum hosts temporary exhibitions.