Memory of Russia: Exhibition "To Be Restored. Tsarskoe Selo Palaces Revived from the Ashes" presented in Udmurtia

On June 22, 2021, the Local History Museum of the Sarapul Museum-Reserve launched the exhibition project "To Be Restored. Tsarskoe Selo Palaces Revived from the Ashes" from the collections of the Tsarskoe Selo State Museum and Heritage Site. The exposition marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War and will run until August 18.

It is held as part of the "Culture" national project and supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Charitable Foundation for Assistance to the Tsarskoe Selo State Museum and Heritage Site. The project unites four cities: Perm, Sarapul, Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk.

The Sarapul participation in this project is not accidental. During the Great Patriotic War, this city stored masterpieces of Leningrad suburban palaces-museums. In October 1941, the building of the Local History Museum in Sarapul hosted the Museum and Repository of Leningrad suburban palaces-museums. In the most severe times in Sarapul, museum specialists preserved more than 90,000 museum items from the collections of Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, Pavlovsk, Gatchina, St. Isaac's Cathedral, the Museum of the History and Development of Leningrad, the Summer House of Peter I in the Summer Garden.

The exhibition features one hundred items from the Tsarskoe Selo collections - documents, photographs, newsreels, paintings, pieces of applied art. They are associated with the military history of Tsarskoe Selo. The exposition spotlights the feat of specialists who helped evacuate rarities and defended museums. It also reveals the heroic post-war restoration of the ensemble, which has no analogues in world restoration practice.

The project introduces the main milestones in the museum life from the pre-war period to the present day. The curators focused on the evacuation of museum items and the return of works looted during the war.

The exposition includes original fragments of the Amber Room (Berlin, 1700s–1710s); a chair from the Chinese Hall (China, 1770s), discovered in 1946 on the ruins of the Royal Castle in Königsberg; original sculpture "Girl with a Jug" (this exhibit for the first time in its 200-year history makes a journey across the country); items that were looted during the war and returned to the museum many years later.

The exhibition project started in Saint-Petersburg in May 2020, in the year of the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory, in the "Russia is my History" historical park. Because of the difficult epidemiological situation, the exhibition ran virtually for the first few months.

On May 9, 2021, in Perm, the exhibition launched a trip across Russia. From June 22, a unique project from Tsarskoe Selo will be available for residents and guests of Sarapul.