The Museum of Unusual Collections

As a kid of the 70s I became interested in collecting stuff when I was 6 years old: I collected postage stamps, pins, matchboxes and match labels, and candy wrappers. Growing up I attended lots of study groups and the objects my collections changed along the way: from archaeological findings and minerals to model planes and cars. For almost 50 years I traveled around the world and visited different regions of Russia and always brought back dozens of objects. When there was no more room in the flat and the house, I had to move my collection to three garages. When I ran out of space there too, I started thinking about museums and exhibitions. In 2015, I opened a house-museum called “Butterflies and Dragonflies” and in 2019, I received a grant from the Presidential Grant Foundation which allowed me to establish the Museum of Unusual Collections. Every year I also organize several visiting exhibitions at other places.

The motto of the museum is “Anyone can collect and anything can be collected”. The purpose of the museum was to display the collections of Igor Skripay and his family, which had been collected over the years, and to raise interest in collecting. The museum presents more than 40 collections of different kinds of objects, varying from fossils to model spaceships, from minerals to unusual lighters, as well as pins, thimbles, model cars and planes, china dolls, cross-stitch embroideries, brewery articles, mini-bars, matchboxes and luggage labels, perfumes, cat and dog figures, tea accessories, flora and fauna in jewelry, etc.