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# Yesterday came the news that the governor of Smolensk is stripping the Khmelita museum-reserve of its status as a specially protected natural area
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/vchera-poiavilas-novost-o-tom-chto-smolenskii-gubernator-snimaet-status-osobo-okhraniaemoi-prirodnoi-territorii-s-muzeia-zapovednika-khmelita/
- Published: 2023-01-27T14:03:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:37:09.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Museums, Observations, Heritage, Society, Nature

Yesterday came the news that the governor of Smolensk is stripping the Khmelita museum-reserve of its status as a specially protected natural area. I am very fond of Khmelita and have been there many times, so I immediately approached the museum's management for comment, and I return to you with the details of what is happening, straight from the source.

**Alongside the museum-reserve (a federal state budgetary cultural institution), a regional specially protected natural area of the same name had existed since 1998 on the same territory as the museum. The museum-reserve and the protected area together cover 24,635 hectares.**

**By decision of the court, the Administration of the Smolensk Region has revoked the decree establishing the protected area.**

**The abolition of the protected area has no bearing whatsoever on the work of the Khmelita museum-reserve. The museum, as before, is open to cooperation and welcomes visitors hospitably.**

**The museum continues to exist and to operate as before.**

*More about the museum:*

*The museum-reserve is named after the fine Russian poet and dramatist, the brilliant diplomat A.S. Griboyedov, since its first exhibitions and displays were housed in the Griboyedov family estate, a unique manorial complex built in the style of Elizabethan Baroque, extremely rare in the Russian provinces.*

*The restoration of the estate and its conversion into a museum, including the formal and landscape parks and the system of ponds, has been going on for more than a decade. The museum's founder and first director, Viktor Yevgenyevich Kulakov, sought to preserve the memory not only of Griboyedov but of other famous people connected with the Smolensk region, and with the historical events that took place in these parts.*

*In 2002, for the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian naval commander Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov, who was born a few kilometres from Khmelita, a museum dedicated to him was opened. The museum-reserve also preserves the places where he was born and baptised, and the gravestone on his mother's grave.*

*The environs of Khmelita are also bound up with the memory of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War. At the site of the heroic breakout in October 1941 of the encircled Soviet troops, branches of the museum-reserve have been created: the Memorial to the Soldiers of the Western and Reserve Fronts "Bogoroditskoye Field" and the "Bogoroditskoye Field" museum. On the field by the memorial, the remains of Soviet soldiers found by search parties are reburied every year, and the Watch of Memory and other commemorative events are held. Descendants of the Moscow militiamen come here to remember the defenders of the Fatherland.*