MOSCOW, December 27, Anastasia Silkina.People in turbulent times always hid valuables, hoping to use them later. But circumstances were often such that the caches remained untouched for centuries. Read about the most famous treasures, some of which can be seen in the Historical Museum.
When they hid the most
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"As a rule “, the desire to hide something is connected with turning points in the history of the country,” said the director of the State Historical Museum Alexey Levykin at the opening of the exhibition “Treasures. Hidden history.
This is the largest treasure in Russian history, the Naryshkinsky one, brought to Moscow for the first time. Family silver from the noble Trubetskoy-Naryshkin family was found in St. Petersburg in 2012. Now it is part of the collection of the Tsarskoye Selo Museum-Reserve.
The story of the discovery of the treasure is reminiscent of a movie plot. A policeman on duty during night duty noticed that something was being loaded into a car from a construction site on Tchaikovsky Street, house number 29 — in the Trubetskoy-Naryshkin mansion. I decided to find out what was in the bags. It turned out that workers found antique silver in the ceilings between the second and third floors.
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“On an area of about six square meters, more than two thousand silver objects were found, including silverware, orders, medals, and household items,” lists the director of Tsarskoe Selo. Olga Taratynova.
The items were arranged in a cloth soaked with vinegar to prevent rust and wrapped in newspapers, which indicated the age of the treasure: 1917.
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"We started to raise the archives. At that time, the mansion was owned by Natalya Vasilievna Naryshkina, who married the captain of the Life Guards Hussar Regiment, Sergei Sergeevich Somov. According to documents, they left for France in 1917. Apparently, they made this cache with the intention of returning,” explains the head of the museum-reserve.
In the Historical Museum you can see small and large tea sets, candelabra, a nail care kit, a glove holder and other items everyday life of the Russian aristocracy in the mid and late 19th — early 20th centuries.
In a communal apartment and on the balcony
The doctor Viktor Petrovich Uspensky was a deputy of the State Duma in 1906. He hid documents, photographs, Browning with cartridges in the double bottom of the locker.
After Uspensky’s death in 1919, the cabinet stood unattended for a long time in a communal apartment on Malaya Bronnaya, until the locksmith who lived there took it with him to a new apartment. Ten years later I decided to dismantle the furniture and discovered a secret.
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“He reported to the police, and from there the treasure entered the museum in the early 1980s,” says exhibition curator Igor Kuraev. “An interesting set of documents: there are bonds, and receipts, and his personal certificate, and a certificate of higher medical education, and a deputy’s card.”
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Utensils instead of a library
Many discoveries have always been made by city economic services during construction, laying cables, and planting trees.
For example, Ipatievsky a treasure discovered in the capital's Ipatievsky Lane in 1895 during the construction of a sewer system. Helmets-cones, chain mail, tips of pikes, spears and spears date back to the first half of the 16th century.
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“Apparently, at this place there once stood the house of a very rich serviceman. In 1547, there was a great fire in Moscow: everything from Arbat to Kitai-Gorod burned down, says exhibition curator Lyudmila Savchenko. “Most likely, the house burned down, and this arsenal remained in the cellar.”
Sometimes professional archaeologists do not find what they are looking for. In 1894, Prince Nikolai Shcherbatov, in search of the library of Ivan the Terrible, discovered a lot of broken dishes in the basement of the Annunciation Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin.
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“What we consider ordinary today was incredibly expensive in the 15th century. Either it was brought by eastern merchants, or, most likely, ambassadors presented it as a gift to the Grand Duke,” notes Savchenkova.
Sometimes the choice of items for a cache can be surprising: money, jewelry and weapons were not always valuable. In the Stone Age, people hid blanks for tools, flint arrows, and bone figurines of animals that had sacred meaning. With the development of bronze, the composition of treasures also changed: sets of axes, sickles, ingots, stone casting molds. In the same era, such high-status treasures as the Borodino treasure appeared, in which symbols of power and weapons of warriors, leaders and heroes of the epic appeared. media-type=»photo» data-crop-ratio=»1.3974609375″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»838″ data-source-sid=»rian_photo» title=»Alpatiev treasure at the discovery exhibition Treasures: Hidden History in the New Exhibition Hall of the State Historical Museum in Moscow» class=»m-vertical lazyload» width=»1920″ height=»2683″ decoding=»async» />
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“We would like the exhibition to push people to think about what they would hide now and what is valuable to them,” concludes Kuraev.
See treasures and reflect on this topic in the Historical Museum until July 29, 2024.