Hobby of collecting: Lyudmila Gagalinskaya from Verkhnedvinsk told about her hobby

Sometimes a hobby becomes the meaning of life and develops into serious collecting. Lyudmila Gagalinskaya is passionate about the history of two districts of Vitebsk region: Miorsky and Verkhnedvinsky. According to her, she became interested in the past at school.

With the light hand of the teachers, the girl, like many other Soviet schoolchildren, began collecting postage stamps and coins. Then, as the older sister said, Lyudmila began to carry "all the junk" into the house. Any old or antique thing or a fragment of it attracted the girl's attention. She kept what she found at home, filling her room with future exhibits.

– Wherever I have worked, my colleagues, knowing about my hobby, gave me something that might be of interest. Once an old friend Vasily brought a stuffed toy of the Soviet era – Cheburashka. I have never had such things before. And along with documents, copies of them, and archaeological finds, she began to collect soft toys from the Soviet period," the interlocutor said.

Today, Lyudmila's collection contains several thousand items. How much exactly, she finds it difficult to say herself. These are handicrafts: embroidery, knitting, weaving, vine and straw weaving, ethnographic exhibits that the collector managed to collect on the territory of two districts - household items from the end of the XIX century and before the beginning of World War II. And the largest part is the objects of the post–war period, the era of the USSR. These are paraphernalia with symbols, household items, radio electronics, toys, literature, souvenirs.

The collector also has items from the period of the war of 1812 belonging to the Lopatinsky family, and archaeological finds.

Lyudmila also has a collection of bells in her apartment in Verkhnedvinsk – more than a thousand.

– I've been collecting my collection all my life. I found something myself, and my friends gave me something. I like doing this. I explore each new exhibit as much as possible, trying to find out its history. My husband shares my hobby and even built me a separate house to store my "treasures," Lyudmila shared.

This house is located in the Myor region in the agricultural town of Uzmen. Here, as the chairman of the local village executive committee, Anna Boreisha, said, the owners are going to create a museum exposition, show and tell tourists, who are becoming more and more numerous in these parts every year, what these lands were famous for, how our great-grandfathers, grandfathers and grandmothers lived.

Photo by Alexander OZERSKY

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