I.D. Samoylov Museum-Reserve of Wooden Architecture and Folk Art

About museum

An open-air museum in the historic village of Nizhnyaya Sinyachikha exhibiting types of residential and agricultural buildings of the Urals, as well as a collection of Ural folk painting used for interior decoration of houses, shutters and other applied art objects. The museum's founder is I.D. Samoylov. From 1967 Ivan Danilovich began practical restoration work on monuments of stone and wooden architecture. For ten years he led the restoration of the late 18th-century architectural monument, the Transfiguration (Spaso-Preobrazhenskaya) Church in the village of Nizhnyaya Sinyachikha. In 1978 he opened a folk museum of Ural domestic painting in that building and, adjacent to this monument on open land along the banks of the Sinyachikha River across an area of 52 hectares, created an open-air museum-reserve of wooden architecture. The museum complex includes more than 20 different buildings and structures, including three peasant estates from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, four chapels, a fortress tower and a watchtower, a windmill, and a fire station with a lookout tower. The museum also displays peasants' household items and tools, the world's only collection of folk painting on wood (Ural, Western Siberia, 19th century), icons of local painting from the 18th and 19th centuries, and manuscript and early printed books from the 19th century. Permanent exhibitions of household items and folk-applied art are presented in the estates; wood carving is exhibited in the Chapel of Zosima and Savvaty of Solovetsky; the watercolor collection by A.I. Trofimova and applied art by Kh.D. Chuprakova are housed in the Chapel of the Ascension.