There is no clear definition of an open-air museum. In modern museological literature, this term is used to define the preservation of monuments of folk architecture, usually wooden, and the demonstration of some type of culture and ethnographic collections.
History of origin
The first open-air museum was organized in Sweden in 1891. This was the famous Skansen, which remains the authoritative center of this direction of museum work to this day. The idea was taken up by Norway and Denmark, and from that moment this type of museum exposition began to spread throughout the world. The Association of Open-Air Museums has emerged, performing methodological and educational functions.
In Russia, the first such exhibition complex was opened in 1927 in Moscow's Kolomenskoye park - the former country estate of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich.
Russian museums
There are a lot of open-air museums in Russia. If we follow the classification proposed above, then the group of museums that preserve monuments of folk architecture can be attributed, for example, Kizhi in Karelia, included in the list of UNESCO cultural heritage sites, Vitoslavitsy near Novgorod and St. George's Monastery of the XII century, the Museum of Wooden Architecture in Suzdal, Irkutsk Taltsy and others. All these museums in a small area preserve wooden residential and farm buildings. To do this, they are transferred to one place, which becomes an open-air museum. At the same time, they work as ethnographic ones, since there is presented the life of the indigenous population of a given area of the era to which the buildings are dated. The museum employs local residents who reproduce the everyday culture of a certain historical period.
A special place among open-air museums is occupied by the Tomsk Pisanitsa in the Kemerovo Region, which is not very well known to the wide Russian audience. There are preserved unique primitive rock paintings and at the same time it is an open-air ethnographic museum, where you can see wooden structures from different eras of the indigenous Siberian people of the Shors.
Palace and park ensembles (Petrodvorets, Tsaritsyno, etc.), noble and writers' estates (for example, Yasnaya Polyana, Trigorskoye and Mikhailovskoye, Spasskoye Lutovinovo) are also open-air museums.
Conserved archaeological excavations, presented for public viewing, can be attributed to the same group of museum complexes. They can be seen in the Russian Crimea (Chersonesos, Panticapaeum in Kerch), the Tula Kremlin, Novgorod the Great, etc.
Fields of military glory represent a special kind of the best Russian museums of this type. There are many of them in Russia, but three are open as museums: Kulikovskoe, Borodinskoe and Prokhorovskoe.
Open-air museums are a promising area in the museum business, which is actively developing all over the world.
