Sviyazhsk planning to open a museum on landing stage

Will the landing stage be painted by volunteers?

Assistant to the President of Tatarstan Olesya Baltusova reported about the joyful event. “The historical landing stage of the 1970s, with the mutual agreement of all parties, will soon be sent from the island of Lokomotiv to the island of Sviyazhsk. I thank the ministry of transport of the Republic of Tatarstan and personally the head of the University of River Transport, Ilyas Salakhov, for the assistance that still continues. We are going to have a new museum in Sviyazhsk when we repair everything. Maybe even with the #tomsoyerfestkazan team! Hooray!!!” she wrote on her page in social networks and congratulated the director of the museum-reserve Island-City of Sviyazhsk, Artem Silkin. Silkin confirmed the information:

“It was on the balance sheet of the river technical school, which wanted to write it off. But we asked for it. We would like to open the museum in it, which is dedicated to both river shipping and related topics. For example, for me, this is an important part of life, as for many Volzhans.”

For me, the Rakhmi M. Koch Museum in Istanbul is an example of such a project. In it, by the way, there are no real landing stages, only layouts.

The Rahmi M. Koch Industrial Museum in Istanbul is a private museum of transport and industry with a total area of 27,000 square meteres. Its exhibits include cars, sea vessels, steam locomotives, trains, buses, motorcycles, airplanes, and trams. It was opened by businessman Rakhmi Mustafa Koch, now honourary chairman of Koç Group (113 companies, 90,000 workers). When his collection was no longer housed in his own premises, he opened the museum in 1994, and two years later the old shipyard was added to it. Koch was inspired by the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan.

Landing stages are gradually disappearing in our country, Silkin notes. Now there is a long process of transferring the object to the balance of Sviyazhsk, he says:

The landing stage, which previously served as a monument of the Soviet era, as well as the Lokomotiv beach itself as a whole — is 1,5-deck (that is, single-deck with strongly pronounced aft and bow superstructures). The question of the preservation of such objects was raised, for example, in January 2020 in the Committee of the Republic of Tatarstan for the Protection of Cultural Heritage Objects: the problem is that real estate can be a monument, but the landing stage is still a non-self-propelled vessel. Baltusova said the same thing in April 2019. At the same time, there was an opinion that one of the landing stages could be put on a permanent parking lot on the island-grad Sviyazhsk (at the moment, there is a relatively new landing stage of 2015).

“We worked on this issue with Pavel Tinyaev, the Sviyazhsk Museum-Reserve, and Artem Silkin," explains Olesya Baltusova. “The ministry of transport helped us in this. The director of the Kazan branch of the Volga State University of Water Transport, as the technical school is now called, met us halfway. Their training base was located on the landing stage. We agreed that they would move it to the island of Sviyazhsk.”

Now there is a long procedure for transferring the object from the Federal Property Management Agency to the ownership of the Republic of Tatarstan, the assistant to the president explains, the work is being carried out with the help of the ministry of land and property relations, ministry of culture — at least this required two months of lengthy negotiations.

Besides, it is expected that the volunteers of the Tom Sawyer Fest festival will take part in the restoration — after working on the environmental houses, cultural heritage objects, this will become a new stage for them — nowhere else such work has been carried out in Russia.

In Kostroma — Mikhalkov, Devyataev — here in Tatarstan?

The history of the river technical school began in 1904. Then it was a school and it was located on the current street of Klara Zetkin, to the left of the park Garden of the Fisherman. Only in 1958, the technical school moved to the current academic building on Nesmelova Street, 7. In 1938, Hero of the Soviet Union Mikhail Devyataev graduated from the school — thanks to a new film, all of Russia now knows about him. After the war, the hero pilot sailed on the Volga.

Landing stages at a fairly advanced age (up to 60 years) are used by Tatflot in Pechishchi, Tashevka, Klyuchishchi, Kyzyl-Bayrak, Matyushino, Shelang, Nizhny Uslon, Verkhny Uslon, and Studentsy. In winter, they are stored in the riverport. Previously, they were floating docks with a canteen, rest rooms, but now only the ticket office remains of its former luxury. Most of them are in deplorable condition.

The rebirth of the landing stage can be studied on the example of Kostroma. Landing Stage-103 by the order of the local department of culture became an identified object of cultural heritage of regional significance. The borders of its territory have also been approved. One of the reasons for the careful attitude to the ship of 1967 — it is known from the film A Cruel Romance.