The museum is a web of numerous suites – each and every hall is richly adorned, with in-built decorations, precious and faux gem stones as well as pieces of meteorites supported by rows of Doric-style columns. Every room of the museum contains countless artistic showcases of synthetic materials, amber boards with historical inscriptions and many tens of priceless vases and artwork specimens – followed by several posh, high-tech conference rooms.
St. Petersburg Mining Museum – The Mineral Collection
One of the largest in the whole world, the mineral collection of St. Petersburg’s Mining Museum features minerals collected by generations of both foreign and domestic scientists. The main room, so-called “Hall of Mineralogy”, is created in accordance with the pattern of mock-laboratory where scientific as well as educational tools and facilities are presented in near-gigantic dimensions. The mineral collection includes many diversified samples of copper, silver, quartz, platinum, diamonds, chalcopyrite, crystal, and several malachite deposits weighing over 1500 kg.
St. Petersburg Mining Museum – The Geological Collection
The subsequent collection features large deposits of varied paleontological, geological, and cosmological minerals. It offers multiple exhibitions that illustrate temporal as well as physical phases of the phenomenon of weathering. There are also many well-preserved skeletons of extinct species, as well as samples of petrification fossils of mushrooms, plants, insects dumped in lava, and “drops” of meteoric rains.
St. Petersburg Mining Museum – The Collection of Mining and Metallurgical Equipment
The next collection serves as a visual guide to the history of mining and technological as well as industrial manufacturing of natural resources. Miniature expositions of industrial and factory tools are displayed along unique creations such as a 50-ton hammer, twinned vertical steam-engine, hydraulic pumps and several, minutely-designed prototypes of processing machines.
St. Petersburg Mining Museum – Stone and Metal Artwork Collection
The last collection of the Mining Museum in St. Petersburg gathers artwork produced by students and scientists of the St. Petersburg State Mining Institute over the last 200 years. Some of the most remarkable examples include the following:
The Iron Palm-Tree Hammered from a Single Piece of a Railway Rail;
The Russia Imperial Emblem Made with Articles-Products of the Zlatoust Armory;
Sculptural Composition – “The Royal Hunt”.
Other than, the collection consists of many more decorative swords, coffee tables, portrait medallions, carved dishes, table screens and caskets.
How to Get to the St. Petersburg Mining Museum
The Mining Museum in Saint Petersburg in Russia is located inside of the building of St. Petersburg State Mining Institute. In order to be able to visit the museum, tourists need to ask for a special permission from the authorities of the institute. These permissions are rarely given to individual persons and most excursions are organized via companies or by local business partners.
The Mining Museum is definitely worth visiting. Along the aesthetic value of the expositions, the museum is organized in an orderly manner which facilitates the study of nature’s chronology – the origin and growth of natural resources is followed by preliminary stages of exploitation and manufacturing so as to ultimately reach the point of an almost intimidating wealth of technological and artistic wonders.
