The Old Laundry (Portomoinya) Museum in Yelabuga is located in a stone building of the 19th century. At the end of the 19th century, there was a laundry room where women came to wash their clothes. Water was supplied to the Laundry through a pipeline, which was built in 1832 by Ivan Vasilyevich Shishkin when he was mayor of Yelabuga.
The Old Laundry Museum was established in 2009 during the creation of a museum complex dedicated to the great poet of the Silver Age Marina Tsvetaeva. The Old Laundry is located opposite the house of the blacksmith Brodelshchikov, where Marina Tsvetaeva spent her last days with her son George. While living in the house opposite, Tsvetaeva came to the laundry to get water. Now the Marina Tsvetaeva Museum is open in this house.
The Old Laundry Museum recreates the atmosphere of a 19th-century laundry. Wax figures of women who were engaged in this hard work are installed near wooden troughs. The floor is made of rubble stone. Around the wooden troughs are small buckets, tubs, washing boards and vats. All this was used in the laundry.
In the Old Laundry Museum, you can see a cast-iron stove that has been preserved since 1870. The women washed their clothes in cold water. It was necessary to pay 10 coins for hot water. Soap was also paid for. In addition to soap, bovine bile was used as a detergent.
A fragment of a water pipe from 1832 has been preserved in the house. The pipes of this water pipe were made of larch (tree trunks were hollowed out inside). It operated in Yelabuga until the 1950s. Water was supplied to this water supply system from numerous springs. After the construction of multi-storey buildings began, the water in these springs disappeared.
