Ataman

In 2009, an amazing open-air museum called Ataman was opened on the Taman Peninsula. Here, on an area of 60 hectares, ethnic buildings from all over the Krasnodar Territory are collected.

The museum has collected exhibits showing the life of the Cossacks in the 18th and 20th century. There are so many exhibits in Ataman that even a cursory inspection will take several hours. In the museum complex, a Cossack capital with several streets was formed from huts. Among the buildings, you can see the houses of ordinary Cossacks, shoemakers, potters, atamans, elders, and even a barber's house. There is even a real hut on chicken legs with household items of Baba Yaga. All the houses in the museum are assigned to the districts of the Krasnodar Territory, which monitor their proper condition and repair them if necessary.

The way people lived in the 18th century was far from ours. Only well-to-do peasants and chieftains could afford log houses. Ordinary Cossacks assembled the frame of the house from poles and brushwood, the walls on both sides were coated with clay with crushed straw. The base of the ceiling, if there were enough funds, was made of small logs or planks, and if it was not possible, then the walls were also made of poles and clay. The roof was made of reeds and straw. The straw was watered with liquid clay. Only well-to-do families could afford wooden floors, while the rest were kept cold on an earthen floor greased with cow dung. There was a stove in the house, which was heated only in winter, and in summer they used the summer kitchen, in which various dry vegetation and dung were burned for cooking.

The land in the Ataman Museum is archaeologically valuable, so it cannot be dug and wells with basements have only an above-ground part. Visiting the Ataman Museum, you can see the conditions in which people lived in Cossack villages from the 18th to the 20th century, as well as the period after World War II, when the entire infrastructure of the south of the USSR was destroyed.

Atamani sometimes hosts various holidays for adults and children. If you wish, you can try yourself as a potter or blacksmith, study at an old school, taste dishes in an inn or tavern.