Description of the attraction
One of the oldest museum institutions in Ukraine is the Zhytomyr Regional Museum of Local Lore, which is located in the city center, in a cozy park on the Castle Square.
The old mansion, erected in the 19th century for the head of the Zhytomyr Catholic Diocese, is called the Episcopal House in Zhytomyr. Today, it houses the Museum of Local Lore, which was founded in 1865, at a time when the Volyn governor M. Chertkov presented a private collection of 48 samples of minerals and rocks for examination in the public library.
At the beginning of 1900, the entire collected collection was transferred to the Museum of the Society of Volyn Explorers. In 1911, the museum was given a separate room, and it became known as the Volyn Central Museum. A significant contribution to the development of the museum and to the replenishment of its fund was made by: archaeologist S. Gamchenko, geologist P. Tutkovsky, and ethnographer V. Kravchenko.
Since 1914 the museum has been operating as an independent institution. Its first head was S. Brzhozovsky. After the revolutionary events (1917-1921), the museum's exposition was replenished with a collection of coins belonging to the leader of the Zhytomyr nobility K. Simonich, materials from the Volyn diocesan ancient storage, a nationalized collection of barons de Choduard and counts Ilyinsky-Stetsky. In 1925 the museum was given a new status and name - Volyn State Research Museum. The museum received its modern name in 1950.
To date, the museum fund has more than 150 thousand items. storage. Particularly valuable are the taxidermy collection, a collection of paintings by Western European artists of the 16th-19th centuries, materials from the excavations of the Raikovets settlement (XI-XIII centuries), the Zhytomyr site of the Early Paleolithic and the Radomyshel site of the Late Paleolithic.
For visitors, the museum conducts thematic and sightseeing tours of the history and culture of the Zhytomyr region, local history and ethnographic circles have been created.
