Description of the attraction
The Museum of Playing Cards is located in Peterhof (Pravlenskaya Street, 4), in the building of the former Palace Board, erected at the end of the 18th century. This museum is one of nineteen map museums in the world, and the only one in our country.
The opening ceremony of the museum took place on September 25, 2007. Until the museum was founded, the collection of card decks and items that correspond to the theme of board games belonged to Alexander Semenovich Perelman. For more than thirty years, Alexander Semyonovich bit by bit collected his collection of maps and dreamed of opening a museum. Perelman quickly became famous among the players and collectors of antiques, which favored his hobby.
One of the oldest decks that A. S. Perelman, refers to the 16th century. Many famous people often replenished this collection: for example, Academician Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev gave Perelman two decks of cards, which in 1988 he received from Nancy Reagan (Ronald Reagan's wife).
The project of Alexander Perelman included the construction of a museum in the form of a house of cards. A special plan was even created: the walls were made of cards, and the windows were depicted in the form of card suits. In the days of the Soviet Union, it was not possible to implement such an idea, not only because of the negative attitude of the authorities towards gambling, but also because of the content of the meeting itself. Some of the exhibits contained explicit anti-Soviet propaganda and could provoke a considerable prison term for their owner. By the way, the revolutionary deck, which was actively spreading in Europe during the Cold War, depicted all revolutionaries in grotesque form. The artist replaced the usual card suits: tambourines are depicted in the form of stars, hearts appear as fists, clubs - hammer and sickle, spades - with black flags.
For many years A. S. Perelman negotiated the transfer of the collection and the formation of the museum. And only in 1999, already from Victoria Vladimirovna, the widow of Alexander Semenovich, the collection was bought by the state museum-reserve "Peterhof" for a symbolic amount. At the time of the transfer, the collection numbered more than six thousand exhibits, among which there were about one thousand unique card decks.
Until the opening of the museum in 2007, the collection of card decks was constantly replenished. In 2006, Peterhof buys at Christie's several rare Italian tarot cards, an Indian deck made of mica, and unique 1960 German "peddler cards" and other items from the Stuart Kaplan collection. Stuart Kaplan, interested in the collection of Alexander Perelman, attended the opening ceremony of the museum in Peterhof and presented him with several very interesting exhibits, among which should be noted a domino made from bones by Napoleon's officers. Domino was fished out of a stew for prisoners who were serving sentences in an English prison.
The Museum of Playing Cards invites visitors to view the exposition, located in six halls and consisting of more than eight thousand exhibits from all over the world, including author's cards made in the 16th-20th centuries by famous artists from Russia, Asia, Europe, America.
In addition to traditional playing cards, the museum exposition includes tarot cards and other fortune-telling cards, as well as geographical, educational, children's and other cards. Among them there are real sketches of the Atlas deck, created by the academician of painting Adolph Iosifovich Charlemagne. The design of this deck has not changed in our country for over 150 years.
Also in the showcases you can find maps of various shapes and sizes: from huge 10x16 cm to tiny 2x5 cm, round, oval, rectangular, zigzag. The Japanese cards for the game "One Hundred Poets" and the Chinese cards for the game "Manjong" attract special attention.
In the last hall, modern playing cards are presented, among which there are agitation, advertising, anniversary, souvenir and political cards. Of great interest are "prison maps" made from newspapers.
