Description of the attraction
The Sun Museum in Novosibirsk is one of the most unusual museums in Russia and the only one in the world. It is located in Akademgorodok and occupies only two rooms.
The idea to found the Museum of the Sun arose back in 1986 at a personal exhibition that was held in the recreation center “Stroitel” under the slogan “Let's create a Museum of the Sun”. The initiator of the creation of the museum was Valery Ivanovich Lipenko, who is currently its head. The Novosibirsk Museum of the Sun contains more than 2 thousand storage units dedicated to the Sun. About 500 exhibits are the author's works of V. Lipenkov himself.
On the walls of the museum you can see all kinds of images of ancient solar symbols that were copied from the original archaeological finds, traditional folk images of the Sun, solar talismans, amulets of various countries and peoples. In addition, the museum presents an extensive collection of items from the Indian and Nepalese solar tradition, as well as Indian and Old Russian. All the "gods" were carved into wood by the founding father of this unique museum, wood artist V. Lipenkov. For a more detailed study of how exactly the different peoples of the world depicted the Sun, he made several research trips, enriching the collection with exhibits from India, Nepal, Indonesia and Australia.
The oldest museum piece, the shell of a fossil mollusk, is about 300 million years old. The shell was found on the coast of the Arctic Ocean by the director of the West Siberian Film Studio Valery Novikov.
On the days of the solstice and equinox, the museum organizes the Sun festivals. The number of visitors to the museum is growing every year. On average, more than six thousand people visit it per year.
Since 1999, the Museum of the Sun, together with the municipal teenage club "Solnechny", has been holding a children's competition "Children draw the Sun". The best works were exhibited not only in Novosibirsk, but also in Moscow, Voronezh, St. Petersburg, Kirov, Kemerovo, Tomsk, Novokuznetsk, Gorno-Altaisk and Berdsk.
