Kostroma Sloboda

Kostroma Oblast
Prosveshcheniya str. 1B, Kostroma,
Phones: +7 (4942) 51-43-90
Web site: http://kosmuseum.ru/

In total, the Museum presents about 30 monuments of wooden architecture of the Kostroma region and neighboring Nizhny Novgorod and Vologda regions. Inside most of the buildings there are thematic expositions.
The territory of the Museum is also a platform for mass folk festivals in the traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia, folklore festivals, promotion and support of folk arts and crafts.
Here visitors will find:
- expositions about the life of the Kostroma peasantry;
- guided tours and interactive programs for visitors of all ages;
- costumed holidays;
- picturesque meadows, a pond and wooden bridges are a great place for photography.

The architectural and ethnographic Department "Kostroma Sloboda" is located on the arrow of the Volga and Kostroma rivers. It was established on may 3, 1960, and the beginning of its formation was associated with the construction of the Gorkovskaya HPP in the early 1950s. The Gorky reservoir is being created, the Volga river is overflowing its banks and part of the famous Kostroma lowland has entered the flood zone. In the villages of those places is a unique wooden building, the Church of the Transfiguration (1713). spas of the Tower and pile, the "black" bathhouse of the D. Buckets that formed a cultural phenomenon of the peasant architectural heritage. In order to preserve these monuments for future generations, they were moved in 1955 to the territory of the Kostroma Museum-reserve, which was then located within the walls of the Ipatievsky monastery. Actually, these pile objects marked the beginning of the Kostroma Museum of wooden architecture in the open air.

Later, the Museum began to develop other areas adjacent to the Ipatiev monastery. In the early 1960s, monuments of folk architecture from more remote villages of the Kostroma region were installed in the former podmonastirskaya Bogoslovskaya (now Ipatievskaya) settlement. This is primarily the Church Of the Cathedral of the virgin Mary (1700) from the village of Holm, Galich district, the house of the peasant Yershov from Mezhevsky district, etc.

In the late 1960s, the Museum began to develop the territory of the Strelka river of the Volga and Kostroma. The first monument placed on the former water-filled monastery meadows was the Church of the Saviour of the all-merciful (1712) from the village of fominskoye, Kostroma district. To the right of the temple, behind the grove, are established mills-stolbovki from the Soligalichsky district, and along the left Bank of the river Igumenka gradually builds a village street consisting of former residential houses of Kostroma peasants.

According to the original idea, the open-air Museum was supposed to present to its visitors the diversity and dignity of monuments of folk architecture. But since the second half of the 1970s, the Museum's peasant buildings have been supplemented with ethnographic expositions, which ultimately allowed us to fully recreate the life of the Kostroma village in its entirety. And behind the houses, in the field, then barns, an ovin, a blacksmith shop are installed, which actually reconstructs the traditional layout of peasant estates.