For there are also attractions outside the fortress walls.On the right bank of the city there is the most ancient temple of Smolensk – the Church of Peter and Paul.This one-domed temple was built in 1146 and is now located near the railway station.On the other bank there are two more ancient churches of the 12th century – the Church of John Theologian (end of the 12th century), which was almost completely rebuilt in the 18th century, and Church of Michael the Archangel(Svirskaya) (1194). Of interest is Abraham’s Monastery of the 13th century, which housed a Catholic Dominican monastery in the 17th century. In the southwestern part, in a place called Readovka, in 1970 a monument to the Mound of Immortality was erected with a monument “Grieving Mother”. During the Great Patriotic War, mass executions of civilians and soldiers by the Nazis took place here. More than three thousand people are buried in local mass graves.
The main museum of the city is the Smolensk State Museum-Reserve. It was founded in 1888. Today the museum has 12 departments in Smolensk and 4 branches in the region, in total it occupies 38 buildings and is one of the largest museums in Russia.
The exhibition hall is located in the Ascension Cathedral. In the Trinity Cathedral there is a museum “Smolensk flax”. Museum “Smolensk – shield of Russia” is located in the Thunder Tower. The Art Gallery is one of the most visited museums in Smolensk. It presents Russian art from ancient Russian icons to the works of masters of the early 20th century. The canvases of V.A. Tropinina, I.I. Levitan, I.E. Repin, F.S. Rokotova, I.K. Aivazovsky, V.A. Serov, K.A. Korovina, A.N. Benois, K.A. Somova, R.R. Falk and N.K. Roerich. The gallery also presents an exposition of Western European painting of the 15th-20th centuries.
The Historical Museum is the oldest in Smolensk, it was founded in 1888. Its exposition tells about ancient Smolensk, about its culture, the events of the Patriotic War of 1812, the life of the 17th-19th centuries, the Smolensk nobility of the first half of the 19th century are presented in detail. The entrance to the museum is decorated with two bronze cannons. These are real captured military guns that were recaptured from the enemy during the war with Napoleon. S.T.Konenkov Museum of Sculpture was opened in 1973. Smolensk region is the birthplace of this famous sculptor. The exposition of the museum includes about 80 works made of wood, bronze and stone. The most interesting are fabulous wooden sculptures and wooden furniture.
In Smolensk there is a children’s museum “In the world of fairy tales”. The most interesting thing is that the exhibits here can be touched. In addition to fairy-tale characters and dolls, the museum contains collections of children’s clothing of the 17th century, old sleighs, doll porcelain sets.
Museum “City Forge of the 17th century” has been open since 1982 in one of the oldest civil buildings in Smolensk. The museum presents collections of blacksmith tools, anvils, blacksmiths’ clothes of the 17th-19th centuries, and blacksmith’s products.
Museum-apartment “A.T. Tvardovsky in Smolensk. 1943-1965” was created in memory of Tvardovsky’s stay in Smolensk. The museum is located in the apartment where Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky lived when he came to the city as a war correspondent. Here he wrote the poems “House by the road”, “Beyond the distance – distance” and some chapters of “Vasily Terkin”. The expositions of the museum are surrounded by the interior of those times and include objects, documents and photographs that tell about the life and work of the poet. There is also a Natural History Museum.
In addition to the main departments of the Smolensk Museum-Reserve in Smolensk, its branches operate in the region. This is the memorial estate museum of M.I. Glinka in the village of Novospasskoye, the memorial museum of N.M. Przhevalsky and the museum of partisan glory in the village of Przhevalskoye, the memorial estate museum “A.T. Tvardovsky on the farm Zagorye” and the house-museum of M.A. Egorov in the city of Rudnya.
According to etaizhou, 12 km west of Smolensk is the village of Gnezdovo. The village is known for the fact that not far from it, along the Dnieper River, the archaeological complex Gnezdovskie mounds stretches . The total area of the complex is 200 hectares. It includes the remains of an ancient settlement of the 9th-11th centuries and more than ten burial mounds, which consist of 1500 individual mounds. This is the largest pagan cemetery in the world. Excavations have been carried out here for many years. In these places, archaeologists have found a unique clay vessel of the first half of the 10th century with a Cyrillic inscription. Other significant archaeological finds of Gnezdovo are kept in the largest museums in Russia. Near Gnezdovo is the state memorial complex Katyn. At this place in 1940, after the occupation of Poland by the Soviet Union, several thousand captured Polish officers were shot. The complex includes a Polish military cemetery, as well as burials of Russian people executed during the years of repression. Teremok historical and architectural complex is located 15 km southeast of Smolensk near the village of Talashkino ., which is a department of the Smolensk Museum-Reserve. The beginning of the complex was laid by Maria Klavdievna Tenisheva, a well-known art lover. In Talashkino there was the Tenishev estate, which had its own theater and was visited by Sergei Vasilyevich Malyutin, Mikhail Vrubel and Nicholas Roerich. Talashkino during the time of Maria Klavdievna’s stay here became one of the important artistic centers of the country. The historical and architectural complex includes unique buildings – the Church of the Holy Spirit of the early 20th century, which is decorated with mosaics by Nicholas Roerich, and the fabulous house “Teremok”, built in 1901 according to the project of Sergei Malyutin in the neo-Russian style. Today, there is a museum in Teremka, where collections of samples of Russian folk art and the work of Tenisheva herself are presented.
