Exhibition of the Museum of the History of Dagestan's Fishing Industry

About exhibition

Visitors will embark on a fascinating journey through time and learn about the oceanic origin of the Caspian Sea from a map compiled using the data of Claudius Ptolemy (1st century AD), about the presumed outlines of the sea in the 10th–12th centuries according to the maps of the Arab geographers Istakhri and Idrisi, and about the first accounts of the traveler Afanasy Nikitin, who visited the Caspian in 1466–1472 accompanied by merchants from Tver. The exhibition describes how in the first half of the 18th century Peter the Great, with his squadron, carried out the Persian campaign and ordered the construction of a port on the Caspian Sea, and how in 1844 a military installation called Petrovsky was established on the Anzhi-Arka ridge. A significant part of the exhibition is devoted to the stages in the development of the fishing industry, from the 19th-century fisheries to its modern branches: the Makhachkala fish-canning plant, a cooperage, a smoking-and-marinade plant, a fat-processing plant, the sea fishing port and a ship-repair plant. Visitors learn about the famous fish industrialists Vorobyov and Tagiev. The museum features a 'Sea Corner' where visitors can see a rowboat with oars, fishing nets, a ship's wheel, a barometer, a ship's clock, a ship's bell (rinda), a two-tier bunk (shkonka), a canvas anchor float, a control panel, netting hooks and the interior of an early 20th-century fish-industry worker's home.