The Tobolsk Governor Historical and Architectural Museum is located on the Red Square near Nikolsky Vzvoz St. (a steep descent) leading from the Alafeyevskaya Mountain to the Nizhny Posad) in the historical part of Tobolsk.
The museum was founded in 1870. It is the oldest museum in Siberia. The secretary of the provincial statistical committee I.Yushenkov who was also a well-known expert on the history and ethnography of Siberia took the lead in its foundation.
At first the museum hadn’t its own building and existed on sponsor donations. But in 1886, on the eve of the 300th anniversary of the foundation of Tobolsk, it was decided to build a building for the museum. The building also was erected at the expense of donations but on April 10, 1889 the museum received its first visitors.
By 1890 the museum already had the provincial status and was headed by V. Troynitsky himself, the then governor of Tobolsk province. And in 1891 the museum was visited by the prince Nicholas on his way back from the journey round the world. He put his autograph on a mammoth plaque and took the museum under his personal protection.
Today in the rooms of the museum one can see a lot of exhibits related to archaeology, ethnography and paleontology. There one can also see a great number of bone carving items, the colored woodcuts of 19 century and the pictures of local painters, as well as black-letter and manuscript books.
