Orshansky Museum of Peasant Labor and Everyday Life

About museum

On March 23, 1983, the Orshanka Local History Museum was opened in the settlement of Orshanka; in 1985 it was designated as a people's museum and became the Museum of Peasant Labor and Everyday Life. The museum's founder is Nikolai Panteleevich Motovilov, Honored Teacher of the RSFSR and an honorary citizen of the settlement of Orshanka. This museum is part of the Historical and Local Lore Museum Complex of the Orshansky Municipal District and houses documents and items of daily life and labor of local residents. The exhibition presents ethnography and numismatics, a collection of 115 wedding, podduzhny (yoke) and church bells, hand-operated machines with tools for carpentry, turning and coopering, an agricultural section with horse-drawn implements for soil cultivation and for harvesting fodder and flax. The museum is especially proud of its collection of bells and small bells cast at pre-revolutionary factories in the Volga region, so the museum is known as the 'Museum of Bells'.