KHANTY-MANSIISK, March 10. /TASS/. The Surgut District in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region plans to open a family cultural center in 2027 at the Barsova Gora unique museum and tourist complex. The family cultural center will have areas and creative studios for leisure activities, and the region expects the center will attract 150-200 thousand visitors a year, the district's head, Andrei Trubetskoy, told TASS.
Barsova Gora ('panther mountain') is a sacred place of the indigenous northern people - Khanty, where now are a museum complex and a cultural heritage park. In 2022, Barsova Gora opened the Humanity Trail - a 4.3 km long tourist route with historical installations. Work on the trail's development is underway, and new the museum's specialists organize additional locations there. Experts date Barsova Gora's earliest monuments back to the 5th millennium B.C., the Neolithic Era, and the most recent - to the 17th-19th centuries and the early 20th century. They have been discovered during field archaeological works and now they are exhibited at many Russian and foreign museums.
"We have impressive plans for further development of the Barsova Gora Museum and the tourist complex. We plan to create in 2027 a family cultural center, which will have creative studios, play areas for family leisure to involve all generations in the museum's cultural and educational activities," the region's top official said.
In the current year, the region plans to build a scientific center with a congress hall and a simultaneous interpretation booth, he continued. The district's budget has financed the project's design.
The center is necessary for scientific conferences, symposiums and strategic sessions featuring Russian and foreign experts. It will become an intellectual hub providing knowledge exchange, development of research programs, thus strengthening the Barsova Gora Museum's status as a center of scientific attraction. "Besides, we plan to design and build in the future an exhibition multimedia center, which will be the first complex in Russia dedicated to the local history of a territory," he said.
How to return collections and attract tourists
In 2026, the region expects to receive from the Ural Federal University more than 200 collections of finds, consisting of 1,000 items each, he continued. Those are mostly fragments of ceramics found earlier during excavations on the Barsova Gora territory. They will form the basis of the new museum's collection. "The Barsova Gora finds demonstrate how people lived on our territory in different historical periods. The exhibits will be stored at the new museum on Barsovaya Gora, where we have for this purpose six modern storage facilities with professional equipment," he explained.
Earlier, the Barsova Gora Museum's Director Elena Ignatievskaya told TASS that the museum's experts and counterparts of the Ural Federal University had systematized the collections for subsequent transfer to the museum. Those collections were found by scientists of the Ural Archaeological Expedition in the late 20th century and now they are stored at the university's Archaeological Laboratory. Of particular interest, she said, are items from countries of the Middle East, Western Asia and Mesopotamia, which used to get to the present territory of the Surgut District over a commodity exchange with neighboring territories. The most impressive finds from Barsova Gora are currently stored, including at the State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg).
The district's leader noted to TASS that finds from Barsova Gora are currently stored at various museums from Moscow to Stockholm, and the process of returning them is extremely time-consuming, thus it is impossible to expect many collections may return to the museum. "We are currently negotiating the State Hermitage Museum asking for their permission to use digital copies of the exhibits that are stored there - those are ten most valuable and interesting finds. We plan to expose them at the exhibition pavilion on the Trail, and later on - at the new multimedia exhibition center," he explained.
The large-scale development of the museum and tourist facility, which is becoming more interesting and convenient, attracts growing numbers tourists, he continued. In 2025, more than 90,000 guests visited Barsova Gora. "Taking into account our plans to develop the complex, the tourist flow will continue growing and, according to forecasts, by 2030 the number of tourists will reach 150-200 thousand visitors a year," he said in conclusion.
The Surgut District's administration told TASS earlier that initially there were 15 different objects and locations on Barsova Gora's Humanity Tourist Trail, while now they are more than 40. Some of them are observation decks with art objects and interactive equipment: sensor kiosks, a laser, and stationary VR helmets. There is also an exhibition pavilion for conferences and traveling exhibitions. The paleontological pavilion presents an exact replica of a baby mammoth skeleton in an excavation. This exhibition object was created in collaboration with the Russian Academy of Sciences, using three-dimensional scanning of original mammoth bones from the Zoological Institute (the Russian Academy of Sciences).
The ethnographic pavilion presents a scientifically-reconstructed full-scale model of a Metal Age dwelling: in the center there is an open hearth, on the sides there are sleeping places covered with animal skins - the object shows how ancient people lived on Barsova Gora. Noteworthy, the paleontological and ethnographic pavilions are modular, and such structures are used for the first time in the North. For the use in the North's conditions, they had been insulated additionally.