Donets Regional Museum of Local Lore is a cultural and educational institution, which is one of the largest museums in Ukraine, studying the history of the native land. The main attraction of the museum is a stone statue of the Scythian times.
Founded this famous Donetsk Museum in 1924. A. A. Olshanchenko, a teacher of Donetsk Mining College, took the initiative in creating the museum.
From 1930 to 1940 the museum was called the Museum of Revolution. Its exposition has 120 thousand preserved museum exhibits — an inexhaustible treasure trove of ancient objects and archaeological finds. Monuments of nature, history and culture of Donets region keep the secrets and mysteries of the distant past.
A significant part of the museum collections was destroyed by fire during the occupation of the city by Nazi invaders.
Today the main fund of the museum is a collection of paleontology: remains of mammoth, bison, woolly rhinoceros, prints of fossil plants, elements of stone tree trunks. There are monuments of world significance: Amvrosievskaya site and hunting places of primitive man, primitive tools, objects of the Mariupol burial ground epoch (dishes, jewelry, fragments of weapons of burial mounds of the Bronze Age, finds of ancient settlements of log culture, objects of Scythians). The collection includes exhibits of great national value, ancient religious objects of XVIII-XIX centuries, icons, ancient books, shroud and other spiritual heritage of our ancestors. There are also monuments of the Cossack period, collections of silver and copper coins of the XV-XVIII centuries, unique ethnographic collections of the XIX century (Ukrainian clothes), written and artistic sources, unique historical photographs of the city and the region.
The Donets Local Lore Museum includes the S.S. Prokofiev Museum in the village of Krasnoye, the V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko Museum in the village of Neskuchnoye, the Museum of Forest History in Velikoanadolskoye lesnichestvo. The museum keeps things of N. Khrushchev, S. S Prokofiev, V. I Nemirovich-Danchenko, A. I Kuindzhi, D. I Mendeleev and other famous personalities.
The Donetsk Regional Museum of Local Lore has a research complex. Scientific centers of Ukraine, Russia, the USA and Western Europe participate in scientific research together with the Donetsk Museum.