Description of the attraction
The Museum of Local Lore in Goryachy Klyuch is one of the attractions of this city, located on Lenin Street, not far from the Alley of a Thousand Pines.
The initiator of the creation of the local history museum was the commander of the Psekup regiment and historian Popko Ivan Diomidovich, who spoke nine foreign languages. The museum was officially opened in 1864. It was the first such museum in the Caucasus. In fact, the local history museum was located in the open air: a mountain saklya was brought to the local regimental courtyard, covered, furnished and exhibited.
The museum displayed the products of the 19th century masters, the masterpieces of the ancient Greeks and Genoese, agricultural tools, and household items. Especially among all the museum exhibits, they stood out: a lectern for the Koran, mountain agricultural tools, including a one-handed plow, a machine for cutting rifles, an original chest lid decorated with symmetrical triangles made of white bone, and much more.
In 1866, fossilized bones of ancient animals, which were found on the Psekups river near the village of Saratov, were exhibited for the first time in the local history museum. It was thanks to this find that the paleontological department of the museum was created.
In 1871, after the Psekupsky regiment at Goryachy Klyuch was disbanded, the museum became completely abandoned. The main part of its exhibits was transferred to the Maikop and Tiflis museums, the rest were lost. The events of 1917 led to the destruction of the museum buildings. The decision to create a new museum of local lore in the town of Goryachy Klyuch was made only in the late 1990s. The building for it was built by 2000, and the opening took place in 2005. The entrance to the museum of local lore is decorated with a monument to A. S. Pushkin.
Today, the exposition of the museum presents materials on the history of the city, geology, paleontology, ethnography and archeology.
