Novgorod State United Museum-Reserve

About museum

Novgorod State United Museum-Reserve covers more than 71 hectares of territory, has nine branches, 130 buildings and structures, including 113 architectural monuments and 1 work of art, and 61 permanent exhibitions. The Novgorod Museum-Reserve is responsible for 17 of the 37 monuments and ensembles of Veliky Novgorod and its surroundings that are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The museum holds a reference collection of archaeological objects, with birch-bark letters occupying a special place. The museum's collections include major holdings of Old Russian painting, liturgical and ornamental embroidery, works of decorative-applied and jewelry art, manuscript and early printed books, numismatics and sphragistics, architectural-archaeological and ethnographic collections, and Russian painting of the 18th-20th centuries.

The history of the museum begins in 1865, when the collections of church decorative-applied art were started. This was initiated by Nikolai Bogoslovsky with the support of Emperor Alexander II. Since 1976 the museum has included branches in districts of the Novgorod region.