Hidden Jewels in Moscow: State Darwin Museum

Hidden Gems in Moscow: State Darwin Museum

Location: Ulitsa Vavilova, 57, Moskva, Russia, 11729

Cost: 

150 roubles (For full-time university students, ISIC card holders, school children, parents with many children and retirees)

Free (For children below the age of 7)

400 roubles (For everyone else)

SGD1 ~ 47 roubles

Additional costs for certain Interactive Exhibits such as “Walking Through Evolution” and “Know Yourself, Know the World”.

Payment can be done at the museum itself.

State Darwin Museum
The museum is purported to be a natural history museum explaining the works of Charles Darwin on evolution and it consists of two buildings; the Main Building and the Exhibition Halls Building.

The Main Building comprise of the ticket counter near the entrance, a cloakroom and museum store in the basement and some ticket-covered and non-ticket covered exhibitions. To get to the Exhibition Halls building, where the bulk of the exhibitions are, you will have to head down to the basement and find for a passageway that connects both buildings. The Exhibition Hall building is designed in themes, different from level to level, but with proper guidance, you can eke out a flow to the museum. Everything in this building is covered by the ticket except for one exhibition in the upper levels, the museum shop and some virtual simulation rides that you can try out. A worthy note: This museum is huge!

Experience

For someone to have gone all the way to Russia, an unlikely tourist destination for many in itself, the State Darwin Museum is definitely one place not high up on a tourist's wish list of places to visit. People would rather go to the famous Kremlin or St Basil's Cathedral. But Moscow is not only about these two places. If you have the time, the State Darwin Museum is one hidden gem that you definitely do not want to miss.

I came here in the summer of 2018 on a weekend. I did not have a plan for the morning, but I had plans to catch the World Cup at the FIFA Fan Fest at Moscow State University in the evening with some friends. While researching on places to visit nearby to kill the morning, I found the State Darwin Museum, which also happens to be in the ISIC app I was heavily using for inspiration for places to visit.

Hence, I took the Moscow subway train which I was getting familiar with from Prospekt Mira where my dormitory was located to Akademishskaya Station on the M6 Brown line which took me about an hour. After getting off, it took me awhile to get my bearings right and find the museum. The museum is about a 5-minutes walk away from the station.

The museum from the outside does not look all that impressive. It looks like a dull yellow building that did not offer much. A couple of large statues of dinosaurs outside of the museum however, gave clues on what I can find in the museum.

Buying the Tickets

As in most places in Moscow, knowing some Russian will get you a long way. The ticket line is quite long, and the entrance was pretty crowded and rowdy. Noises from an interactive exhibit nearby and people chatting about were blaring in my ears. The majority of the crowd seems to be young Russian families with their little children. When it was my turn to purchase the tickets, I quickly whipped out my ISIC card app and asked in Russian how much it costs for a ticket; ‘Skolka stoit eta bilyet?’. All the ticket prices and signs are in Russian and my Russian was not proficient enough to understand it all, but I did see the ISIC card logo so I assume there must be a discounted price. The ticket lady pointed at the 150 roubles and I gladly took out 150 roubles to pay for the ticket. In return, I got a paper pass which I then gladly pocketed.

Walking Around the Main Building

Every time I walked into an exhibition hall, there is an officer at the entrance who asks for our passes. I was only rejected once, from a very cool looking exhibit called “Know Yourself, Know the World” with the noises and flashing lights but it is because I had to buy a separate ticket. The exhibit also seemed to be primarily geared for children as there were many kids running about and making a deal of a noise in there. At first, I thought that the Main Building was the only building there is. To be fair, I was not expecting much for 3 Singapore dollars as the Moscow Kremlin had cost a lot more. In the Main Building, I visited an exhibit on the history of the museum and then a temporary exhibition on wolves which was in conjunction with the World Cup. The official mascot of the World Cup in Russia was Zabivaka, a wolf. The name itself is a combination of two Russian words that meant 'hothead' and to 'score'. In that exhibition, there were real stuffed wolves and interesting facts about wolves and its symbol in various cultures.
Throughout my visit, I relied on the izi.Travel App, a really useful app that I was introduced to by Russians when I visited the Banksy Exhibition near the Moscow River. It is free to download, and I used it in most museums because the cost of hiring an English language tour guide is relatively quite expensive and I am still not proficient enough in Russian to fully enrich myself in the exhibits. Each museum display usually has a number in which I can refer to in the App that will then provide me with an audio guide of what each display is about. Only some displays are not to be found on this app.
However, after spending a good 20 minutes, I realise that the izi.Travel App indicates a lot more exhibits than the ones in this building. So I went down to the basement where I spotted the museum shop and cloakroom and then I saw some arrows pointing down a linkway. The linkway looked really drab and ordinary, I initially thought it led to the toilet or something, but instead, it led me to an entirely wonderful world.

The (main) Exhibition Building

When I entered the building, I was instantly mesmerized. The first floor has really huge impressive statues of animals reaching almost to the ceiling, and these statues were supposedly to scale! The animal statues are statues of extinct animals such as the Giant Anteater.  There is a winding staircase to the upper levels and also a couple of lifts in the corner. As I mentioned before, from the outside, the museum may look like some plain old building but from the interior everything seemed modern and new and really impressive. 
In the next 1.5 hours, I rushed to explore the many exhibits that there are in this building. The building is very huge and is probably the size of a football field but they have several floors. The museum does not only have exhibits on evolution, with displays upon displays of dinosaur bones or dinosaur replicas, they also have an exhibition on the development of evolutionary studies and an enormous taxidermal collection, so enormous and grand that there are definitely more than 1 000 preserved animals in the exhibits, many of which were purposely poised in impressive curated landscaped environments of the animals natural habitat. So I could find displays of snarling wolves, moose in a fight, a bear on its two legs and all kinds of rare animals. There were simply so many in this taxidermal collection. I eventually skipped some as I was running late; I only had plans to visit for 2 hours.

Non-Ticket Covered Exhibit

I found myself in kind of a clearing on one of the upper levels in the main exhibition building. The last two floors are relatively less crowded and there is a winding staircase I could take that took me to the top of the museum tower where I could see Moscow in the distance. As one walks up these steps, there are small rooms with smaller exhibitions that I could enter, some of which was a bit weird to my taste and I am not sure what they were about as it was not reflected in the izi.Travel App. Some were about stones while some seems to be about art.
However, on one of the upper floors there was this cool metallic UFO like exhibit at one corner. A lady was seated at the entrance so I approached her and asked if I could enter. She said I have to buy a separate ticket for 40 roubles, about 1 Singapore dollar. As I was curious, I paid for the ticket and entered the UFO-like exhibit.
Inside is like a maze that lights up as I walk through, think 'Walking with Dinosaurs'. The exhibit, it turns out, is the “Walking Through Evolution” exhibit which takes me back to the dinosaur’s emergence and extinction in history. As I traverse the maze littered with tropical deco and dinosaur replicas, I would come across rooms in which I must answer a question on the evolution of certain species of dinosaurs, hence I would actually learn something as I move from one display to another. For a dollar, it was definitely worth going through the exhibit and I was a bit surprise that there was only a mother and son in there with me at the time I went!

I also wanted to check out the virtual simulation rides in the museum but unfortunately, I did not have the time; my friend was calling me to come over. I quickly went to the museum shop at the Exhibition Building and bought myself some badges before reluctantly leaving the museum for the Metro station.

Overall Verdict
This is one museum, if you have the time and perhaps covered the ordinary must-travel places in Moscow, in which you definitely must visit. It is certainly great in value especially if you have already applied for an ISIC card. For a less touted about place, this is definitely a hidden gem worth an entire half day visit.

Total Spending for the Visit: 190 roubles ~ SGD 4.04

Keywords: Places to Visit, Moscow, Russia, Museums