The Biysk’s museum of local site lore is the first popular museum in Siberia.
It was founded 14-th of April, 1920.
The famous children’s writer in future Vitaliy Bianki, a sculptor Valentina Sengalevich, an archaeologist Sergey Sergeev, a geologist, the discoverer of Altai’s gold Mikhail Rosen, an entomologist Boris Belyshev, who has been keeping a primacy in confirmation of the drift mainlands theory thanks to his investigations – all these persons were the founders of the Biysk’s museum.
At the present the museum has 18 exhibition’s halls, more than 25 new exhibitions annually, which are visited by more than 60.000 visitors during a year. The museum’s staff consists of 43 employees, having a thing about their activity.
The museum’s fund has more than 140.000 historical artifacts, 20.000 books and 3000 of them are rare books. The earliest of them are dated of XVII-th century.
In the history section you can see a sarcophagus, a cauldron, a weapon from Scythians tumuluses, sacred things of Altaians shamans, original wares of cast- iron artistic founding, Buddhist religious sculptures, a collection of watch and samovars, unique pieces of weapons and firearms, including an infantry flintlock model 1808 engraved with: “The Emperor Alexander 1 had the desire to forge this gun barrel by his grand royal hand in the Izhevsk factory 5-th October 1824”.
All epoch, all people have left their material trace in the museum’s funds, in its exhibitions!!!
The fund of archeology exceeds 70.000 units.
The best collection of a wooden carving in Siberia is collected.
The unique collection of petroglyphs prints of Altai was created. It has more than 300 pictures of different epoch, plots, varied styles and techniques.
All climatic zones of Altai, rare types of animals, birds and plants are presented in the section “The museum of Chuyski high road”.
In the same place you can see all history of the high road from a pack path up to the modern highway М-52, from merchants who named “chuyzi” up to known persons, whose life and work are closely connected with the high road.
They are such persons as Obrouchev, Potanin, Roerich, Sapoznikov, Shukshin and Shishkov.