For everyone who goes on vacation in Odessa, an invaluable experience will be a visit to the Odessa Archaeological Museum — one of the most popular museums in Ukraine. Here are stored not just ancient exhibits — the museum collection is the richest and unique collection of antiquities created in the period from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages.
The museum is located at 4, Lanzheronovskaya Street, in an architectural monument — an old mansion built in 1883 by Polish architect F. Gonsiorovsky. The exposition is located in 10 halls, the total area of which is about 1100 square meters. But even on such an area it is not possible to simultaneously accommodate all the antiquities stored in the museum’s funds, so the exposition is regularly updated, exhibitions devoted to different cultures and epochs are held. In total, the museum has more than 170 thousand exhibits belonging to the peoples who lived in the Northern Black Sea coast, ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium and Italy, Kievan Rus.
The Archaeological Museum of Odessa was founded thanks to the assistance of Odessa philanthropist P. Blaramberg, who donated several monuments to the city museum in 1825. Today these exhibits are part of one of the best collections of Egyptian antiquities in Ukraine. Further development of the museum was promoted by the association with the Museum of Odessa Society of History and Antiquities, whose members also donated unique exhibits to the city fund. In 1883, the museum moved to a mansion specially built at the expense of the mayor G. Marazli.
Thanks to the fact that a research group works on the basis of the museum and annually excavates the ancient settlements, its collection is regularly replenished with new interesting exhibits.
The museum’s exposition is organized in such a way that visitors can easily trace the development of culture and everyday life of different peoples over time.
The first two halls of the museum are dedicated to the period from the Stone Age to antiquity — here you can see objects created thousands of years ago!
The exposition devoted to the period of antiquity includes monuments of cultures of ancient Rome, Greece and Byzantium: sculptures, medals and coins, household items, including precious jewelry, weapons. One of the most famous exhibits is an ancient Greek amphora found at the construction site of another Odessa’s sights — Opera Theater.
And in the collection dedicated to the cultures of Tripillya, Gumelnitsa, Usatovo, Scythians and Sarmatians, Chernyakhovskaya and others, you can see the items of arms, jewelry and household utensils of people who lived a thousand years ago. The exhibits were found in ancient burials, Sarmatian and Scythian burial grounds, settlements that existed on the territory of the city and its neighboring lands, as well as in lands far from Odessa.
The collection of antiquities presented in the Egyptian Hall is considered to be one of the three largest in the territory of the former USSR. It is represented by 400 items, 260 of them are part of the permanent exposition. Here you can see a fragment of the stele of Queen Inkhali, reliefs from the tomb of Hetep, altars and sarcophagi, cult figures and utensils, and even mummies and embalmed ibises, ancient papyri and much more.
The exposition of the Odessa Archaeological Museum also includes a collection of numismatics, which presents about 50 thousand rare coins: from ancient Roman, ancient Greek and Byzantine coins to the first zlatnik of Prince Vladimir (there are only 10 of them in the world).
Odessa Archaeological Museum can be called a real treasury, which holds a priceless cultural heritage, which everyone can see with their own eyes.