The Presidential Library’s virtual tour presents church relics and their custodians

How people managed to preserve unique church relics over the centuries, why the need to create the first church museums emerged, how their fate developed in different periods of our country's history, who stood at the origins of this large and important undertaking - the visitor of the Presidential Library’s portal will be able to find answers to these questions thanks to a virtual tour of the exhibition “Keeping Orthodox faith: the history of church museums. Marking the 1030th anniversary of the Christianization of Rus’”, which is avaialble in the historical building of the Synod on Senate Square, 3.

The Presidential Library’s portal features rarities from the Museum-Ancient Repository of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and the vestry of the Smolny Cathedral: items of church life of the 18th – 19th centuries, including icons made in different techniques and from different materials, details of the bishop's vestments, antimins (boards with sewn into it a particle of holy relics) of the second half of the 18th century and much more.

Rare archival documents, books, scientific monographs, periodicals and catalogs of church collections of the 19th century tell the history of church museums-ancient storages. The exhibition is accompanied by unique photographs from the Presidential Library. This is the work of the photographer of the Imperial Academy of Arts and the recognized master of Russian architectural photography I. F. Barshchevsky, as well as the pioneer of Russian color photography S. M. Prokudin-Gorsky.

The exhibition “Keeping Orthodox faith: the history of church museums. Marking the 1030th anniversary of the Christianization of Rus’” has become another exposition that has moved from real space to digital. The Presidential Library’s portal provides virtual tours of exhibitions of various subjects: Monuments of book culture: from print to digital, Journey from Petrograd to Moscow. 1918: marking the 100th anniversary of the relocation of the Soviet government and the capital to Moscow, An Artist against the Fuhrer: Fascism in the Caricatures of Boris Yefimov. Marking the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, The Saving Sword of the Revolution: the Chekist in Life, Cinema and Literature, More than a game: Marking FIFA World Cup in Russia and others and others. 

The institution’s portal provides virtual tour around the legendary cruiser “Aurora”, the State Memorial Museum of Defence and Siege of Leningrad, the museum “Kobona: The Road of Life”, the museum “And the Muses Were Not Silent...”, and even visit the House-Museum of the famous writer and journalist in Crimea Yulian Semyonov.