Custodians of cultural heritage

"Keepers of Cultural Heritage" is a new educational project of the Museum of Moscow and the Russian Science Foundation.

In the modern world, where rapid progress is preferred, the issue of preserving historical and cultural heritage sites often fades into the background. But there are people who are making significant efforts to preserve valuable artifacts of the past, endangered languages and monuments of intangible culture. It is to these specialists that the new educational project of the Museum of Moscow and the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) "Keepers of Cultural Heritage" is dedicated. Leading Russian scientists - archaeologists, linguists, physicists and folklorists - will talk about their work and explain why it is important to know and develop the culture of different regions and nationalities of Russia.

The project will open on April 7 at the Gilyarovsky Center, a branch of the Museum of Moscow, with a discussion “Why do scientists waste time on endangered languages and fragments of ancient dishes”. The meeting will be attended by Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philology, Chief Researcher of the Higher School of Economics and the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexei Gippius, as well as Candidate of Historical Sciences, Head of the Center for Paleoart of the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences Elena Levanova. The event will be moderated by Timofey Nestik, Doctor of Psychology, head of the laboratory at the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, coordinator of the RSF Expert Council. Scientists and guests will discuss why culture needs to be studied and preserved, who does it, and what everyone can do to preserve our heritage.

Also in April, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, researcher at Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov Irina Balakhnina will tell how physicists help art historians to recreate frescoes from the walls of churches destroyed in Soviet times. At meetings in May, linguist Aleksey Gippius, a student of the outstanding linguist Andrei Zaliznyak, will dispel pseudoscientific myths about the origin of the Russian language and demonstrate how today scientists, like detectives, read birch bark letters and inscriptions left by ordinary inhabitants of medieval Rus’. Archaeologist Elena Levanova will tell about other messages from the past, but already from more ancient ancestors. Her team creates 3D models of famous Russian rock art sites.

In the June block of the project, Anna Dybo, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philology, Professor, Head of the Department of Ural-Altaic Languages of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, will show how linguists study the endangered Turkic languages. Archaeologist, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences Nikolai Makarov will tell how his team managed to find traces of the "invisible" burial grounds of the Suzdal Opole - burial monuments of the 10th-12th centuries.

You can also immerse yourself in the topic with the help of the multimedia project of the Russian Science Foundation “Keepers of Cultural Heritage”, which, through photographs and videos, audio recordings and 3D graphics, tells about the rich culture of Russia, the ups and downs of the scientific process, and the fascinating and important work of scientists.