Museum of World Funeral Culture

About museum

In 2012, academician of the European Academy of Natural Sciences and vice-president of the Union of Funeral Organizations and Crematoria Sergey Borisovich Yakushin founded the Museum of World Funeral Culture on the grounds of the Memory Park of the Novosibirsk crematorium. This museum is the only one in Russia dedicated to the theme of death and funeral rituals. Yakushin's goal was to normalize memorial culture in Russian society. The museum's exhibits are composed of items from the 19th – early 20th centuries: women's mourning dresses, engravings, photographs and postcards, hearses, paintings, sculptures, medals, forensic experts' reports, obituaries and documents. The main hall features an exhibition devoted to the Victorian era, and the second hall presents the funeral cultures of the peoples of the world. The chief exhibit of the latter hall is a reconstruction of an embalming procedure. There is also a mannequin of the embalmed Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and a diorama of the Great Patriotic War.