Exhibition of the main building of the Velsk Museum

About exhibition

The Velsk Local History Museum is one of the oldest museums in Arkhangelsk Oblast. It was established in May 1919 based on the collection of antiques of the peasant Vasily Feoktistovich Kulakov (1867–1945), whose name the museum has borne at the initiative of the staff since 2006. The museum is located in the historic center of the town in five buildings from the late 19th to the early 20th century, two of which are cultural heritage sites. As of January 1 of this year, the museum's holdings number more than 29,000 storage units, including 24,074 items of the main collection and 5,127 of the research-support collection. The most valuable are the collections of bronze pendants (10th–14th centuries), wooden peasant household items (18th–19th centuries), carved wooden crosses and icons (16th–early 20th century), church chronicles, confessional and metric books (18th–early 20th century), late Russian icons (18th–early 20th century), a collection of fragments of house painting (second half of the 19th–early 20th century), naive painting (19th–early 20th century), and others. The museum's main building was built by the burgher P. A. Sobolev of the Tavrengskaya volost of Velsky uyezd on the eve of the First World War. There visitors can see three permanent exhibitions: "Nature and Natural Resources of the Velsk District" (1989, re-exposition – 2014, 2021), "History of Povazhye from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the 20th Century" (1992, re-exposition – 2013–2016), and "Velsky Uyezd/District in 1917–1964: History and Fates" (2019).