Gold Museum

About museum

The exhibition presents items that are unique today but were widespread a hundred years ago — professional tools and prospectors' accessories: vashgerd, ladle, rakes, sluice boxes, jars for collecting gold-bearing sand, scales for gold, etc. Here you can also see maps of gold workings from the mid-19th century. The museum has a very rich collection of minerals from the Berezovsky gold-ore deposit and samples of gold-bearing rocks. By many examples the visitor can trace the complex path of Russian gold — from the accidental find by Yerofey Markov in the vicinity of Berezovsky to the founding of the settlement, and then to the industrial development of Berezovsky and its surroundings; from the imperial state's monopoly to private mining, then to nationalization, to the Soviet monopoly and the Stakhanovite labor of the people of Berezovsky in restoring mines destroyed during the Civil War, to post-Soviet corporatization and the bankruptcies of the 1990s, to the present-day recovery… The museum extensively covers the history of studying the unique Berezovsky gold-ore deposit and describes methods of developing its reserves over more than two and a half centuries. Special attention is given to the story of Lev Ivanovich Brusnitsin, who developed a technology for extracting placer gold.