Description of the attraction
The Ethnographic Museum of the Mari People is located at the highest point of the city of Kozmodemyansk. The main exposition of the museum, consisting of wooden huts, baths, a mill, a well, a smithy and other buildings, is located in the open air in a picturesque place overlooking the Volga River.
The museum, created from the buildings of the Mari people, was transported from the flooded zone of the Cheboksary hydroelectric power station in the early 1980s and acquired an ethnographic orientation. At first glance, the museum resembles an ordinary Russian village, but if you look closely, you can see that the carvings decorating the estate and the chapel, decorative branches sticking out of the walls and traditional attributes of the Mari art give each building its own unique, inimitable look.
The visiting card of the Mari Ethnographic Museum is a working wooden mill, inside of which you can see the mechanisms powered by the rotating mill wings in windy weather. The objects of everyday life, already forgotten in the modern world, are of tourist interest: a well-crane, a summer hut, wicker fences, high swings and a cart with wooden wheels. The museum adorns the estate of a wealthy peasant with an exposition of national clothes and footwear, as well as a smithy, a bathhouse, barns, barns with a completely recreated interior of each building.
The Ethnographic Museum in Kozmodemyansk is the only museum introducing the history of the Mari people, and one of two in the European part of Russia, entirely dedicated to the ethnography of small peoples.
