#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. You can put yourself in the shoes of polar explorers at the Urvantsev Routes exhibition, which is held in the city on the Neva. An inter-museum exhibition project about the outstanding researcher, geographer, doctor of geological and mineralogical sciences will become part of the Norilsk Day in St. Petersburg.
The exhibition-game runs from November 24 this year to February 11, 2024. It will allow you to try on the role of the polar explorer, whose life was connected with the Far North and Norilsk. It will be dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Norilsk and the 130th anniversary of the Nikolay Urvantsev’s birth. The project became possible thanks to the cooperation of two museums – the Norilsk Museum and the Arctic and Antarctic Russian State Museum within the framework of the Russia Museums Union’s Arctic museums section activities.
Walking along the Urvantsev routes will introduce residents and guests of St. Petersburg to the history of Taimyr exploration and the outstanding person’s fate. The exhibition was adapted for the AARSM spaces by Norilsk museum workers. From Urvantsev’s so-called “base”, visitors will be invited to set off on their own route through the Arctic part of the exhibition. Armed with logic and humor, you can try to put yourself in the shoes of the polar explorers and find your own solutions to the difficulties that actually arose along the way.
“Figuratively, Urvantsev is for Norilsk as Peter the Great is for St. Petersburg. He once came here among the first, set up a hut with his comrades for the first winter, now it is called the First House of Norilsk, and during his lifetime he saw how thanks to their research and discoveries, a modern large city rose in the Arctic, a gigantic industrial production”, says Natalya Fedyanina, the Norilsk Museum director. “This is the heroic and very happy fate of the man who left a large, visible, significant mark on the earth”.
By the way, Nikolay Urvantsev’s wife and comrade-in-arms, Elizaveta, was remembered as Norilsk resident No. 1. The Norilsk airport and the NordStar Airlines’s Boeing 737-800 VQ-BAA are named after Nikolay Urvantsev.
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Text: Marina Horoshevskaya, Photo: Nikolay Shchipko
