The attempt of making a Skansen-museum in Tomsk

The first Museum of a new kind of open air museums appeared in 1891 in Sweden and was named the Skansen-museum after the name it was organized in. It exhibited buildings and furnishings, tools and memorials, and as his founder Artur Hazelius said, ''It was devoted to folklore and the history of civilization". Skansen-museums in Russia were established in the early decades of the 20th century. For example, there was such a museum in the former Manor of Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhailovich Romanov near Petrograd in 1919-1922. In the late 1920s an open air museum like Swedish Skansen was organized in Moscow, in the former Tsar estate Kolomenskoye. It is important to note that there were attempts to create a new type of Museum in Tomsk. Those attempts were connected with creating of the Siberian Regional Science and Art Museum. In order to make this Museum a special Committee for the Siberian Regional Museum was organized in February 1911. The members of this Committee, Baron B.A. Aminov, F.Ya. Nesmelov and explorer of Siberia A.V. Adrianov, proposed the establishment of a museum to preserve and study the culture of the peoples of Siberia in a natural landscape. And they used Hazelius' idea of preserving and representing culture of ancestors at the Skansen open-air museum in Stockholm. They developed a plan to move dwelling and household buildings of northern aboriginals of Tomsk Province to Tomsk, placing them in the Park area in the southern part of the city, on the bank of the Tom River. The plan was backed by the Tomsk Duma, which had allocated a plot of land covering an area of more than 7.8 hectares at a territory of modern Lagerny Garden, struggled to find sources of funding for the new Museum. Architect T.L. Fischel and university botanist P.N. Krylov drew plans for the open-air museum. There were developed the ways of forming the museum: B.A. Aminov was ready to transport aboriginal buildings to Tomsk, Museum Committee Chairman F.Ya. Nesmelov published an article in newspaper ''Siberian life'' and invited citizens to participate in the scientific field trips to collect material. A.V. Adrianov, who was in exile in Minusinsk District, made a scientific trip to the South of Eastern Siberia, where he made archaeological excavations, visited and observed the ancient Russian settlements. The projected Scansen-museum was not opened in Tomsk, but the attempts to create it were significant: first of all, it was the integration of Tomsk researchers and world museums and their willingness to understand and implement the latest museum ideas and projects.

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