(Source: http://www.tourprom.ru)

The museum porcelain workshop is the newest museum opened in 2011 in the ancient Desyatinny monastery near the Novgorod Kremlin. Its principles include the ancient craft adjoined by advanced interactive technologies, education and entertainment.

You can visit the museum workshop with your family or send children on a school trip there. Visitors return home with the new knowledge of the history of porcelain and with the souvenirs made by their own hands. The basis of the museum is the famous porcelain factory of the Kuznetsov family “The Partnership for Production of Porcelain and Faience Products”. The family already owned nineteen plants in 1898 when the merchant Ivan Emelyanovich Kuznetsov rebuilt the porcelain factory on the Volkhov River.

In Soviet times the factory on Volkhov turned into the plant “Krasny Farforist”. Perhaps, you can remember deep-blue teapots and cups with gold border and white inside - this is the “blue cobalt”, Kuznetsov porcelain of the Soviet period. The museum workshop is trying to revive the brand, show its history and production in color and sound. They literally use the noise of a porcelain factory during excursions.

The museum hall is a cylindrical room with a rounded vault lined with red brick - you seem to enter into a huge furnace where porcelain is smelted. Tableware and figures, both hand-painted and blank, are arranged in the wall niches.

There are examples of Kuznetsov and younger Novgorod porcelain from XIX century to the present day. Aside from porcelain, the exhibition shows the factory equipment and all the miracles of new technologies. A master-class on porcelain painting begins with the activity when the cups under the glass are “painted” with light with the use of the lamp changing colors. Then the real craft begins.

The visitors are given aprons, paints and brushes, and even adults turn into children at crafts lesson. Some patterns are exhibited for inspiration, but people usually prefer to invent their own patterns. At the end of the session a company seal is impressed on the bottom of cups painted by visitors themselves. Such cups are perfect souvenirs.

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