Azov offers several distinct ways to explore its history: preserved fortifications, exhibitions on weapons and fortification plans, archaeological collections, and paleontological finds. The museum themes also include a memorial room with personal belongings. The ramparts of the Azov Fortress are also a viewpoint overlooking the Don Delta and a popular place for Azov residents to stroll. When planning your stay, it helps to distinguish between these different focuses: they range from military engineering to natural history and a recreated room from an earlier era.
Azov Fortress: Structure, Plans, and Earthen Ramparts
The powder magazine is located in the former Bastion of St. Anna in the Azov Fortress. It is the only surviving monument of 18th-century military engineering in southern Russia. The exhibition in the powder magazine covers firearms and facilities for storing artillery arsenals. It also features plans of the fortifications of the Azov Fortress from the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, a surviving structure and historical depictions of fortress planning offer two different ways to explore military history.
The main exhibition of the Azov Museum-Reserve occupies 15 halls in the former city administration building. An exhibition on the Azov Fortress covers Peter I’s Azov campaigns and the first Russian war fleet. These topics broaden the picture beyond individual fortifications and plans: they also explore military campaigns and the early war fleet. The surviving earthen ramparts, in turn, date from the 18th century and are a monument of federal significance. From them, visitors can look out over the Don Delta. As a local place for a stroll, they offer a different focus from the exhibition rooms.
Museum Treasures and Paleontology
The “Treasures of the Nomads of Eurasia” exhibition at the Azov Museum-Reserve displays unique works of ancient art from the museum’s collections. It includes about 18,000 objects made of gold, silver, and semiprecious stones, as well as archaeological finds made of bronze, glass, and clay. Artworks from the museum collections and archaeological finds in a range of materials give the exhibition its breadth. When comparing the museum’s themes, material diversity is the focus here, while the powder magazine focuses on weapons, arsenals, and fortress plans.
Another focus is the first paleontological hall of the Azov Museum-Reserve, “Traces of the Earth’s Memory,” which opened in 2008. It displays plant impressions, internal casts, and fossils of mollusks, as well as invertebrates and vertebrates from the North Caucasus and Rostov Region. In the second hall, visitors can see a mounted Deinotherium skeleton, described as the only mounted skeleton of its kind in Russia. Together, the two halls take visitors from impressions and fossils to a mounted skeleton; the finds on display also relate to two regions, the North Caucasus and Rostov Region.
Memorial Room and Festival Days
The R. L. Samoylovich Memorial Museum presents the recreated memorial room of a student at the Azov progymnasium. The room depicts the period from the late 19th to the early 20th century and contains original photographs, objects, personal belongings, and rare archival finds. Rather than focusing on a collection organized by material or natural history, the exhibit centers on a single room. In spring 2016, the Azov Museum-Reserve laid out an apothecary garden on the grounds of the Azov Fortress, in the palisade of the Alexeyevsky Hornwork.
Every year, an all-Russian festival of military history clubs takes place on the ramparts of the Azov Fortress. It commemorates the 1641 siege of Azov by the Don Cossacks. If you would like to include the festival in your stay, check the dates for that year’s event in advance. This helps distinguish the annual event date from the permanent fortress and museum attractions described above.
Discover more destinations: Bataisk, Pervoye Maya, Taganrog, Salsk, Kuleshovka, Rossiyskiy, Aleksandrovka, Dorozhnyy
For the regional travel overview: Rostov Oblast.
