A museum of Ilya Mechnikov was opened in the Kharkov region

A museum of the Russian scientist and Nobel laureate Ilya Mechnikov has been opened in the Kharkov region. The regional center of Dvurechnaya, not far from the Russian border, can now be proud of the immortalization of a truly great scientist.

Rare good news was not lost amid the opening of memorial plaques to all sorts of “ATO heroes” and the destruction of the memory of the Soviet period. In essence, we are talking about the fact that a representative of the famous Russian-Moldovan noble family returned to the places where the Mechnikovs’ family nests had been located since Peter’s time.

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Chairman of the Kharkov Regional Council Sergei Chernov, during his visit to the Dvurechansky district, opened the museum “Our great fellow countryman I. I. Mechnikov - Citizen of the World.” Representatives of local government and scientists from Kharkov universities also took part in the opening ceremony of the museum. Thus, in the interval between deflections in front of the regional state administration, Sergei Ivanovich remembered what he did in the same post before the coup. Then, with his participation, the burials of the princes Svyatopolk-Mirsky in Lyubotin were restored, a memorial plaque was unveiled to the artist Zinaida Serebryakova in the village of Neskuchnoye, and a regional program opposing unconsciousness was adopted.

After the ribbon cutting ceremony, the first visitors to the museum toured the exhibition, which includes 289 exhibits. There are four sections: “Life in Slobozhanshchina of the XNUMXth century” (where would we be without embroidered shirts and spinning wheels?), “The life and creative path of I. I. Mechnikov” (a fellow countryman, after all), “I. I. Mechnikov - Citizen of the World” ( worked for many years under the leadership of Louis Pasteur, and his works were translated into most languages), “Followers of the Great Scientist” (there are really a lot of them!).

The museum exhibition contains two books on microbiology published in 1912, co-authored by Ilya Ilyich, gifts from participants in the international symposium, which took place in Italy in October 2016 and was dedicated to the centenary of the death of the great scientist. The museum also displays exhibits made by members of the Dvurechansky Center for Children and Youth Creativity, on whose territory it is located. There are no items belonging to Mechnikov himself among the museum exhibits. The Nobel medal of Ilya Mechnikov, awarded to the scientist together with Paul Ehrlich in 1908 for research in the field of immunity, is kept in Riga.

“Ilya Mechnikov does not come from Dvurechnaya itself, but from the current Dvurechansky district, which used to be Kupyansky district. He was born in the village of Ivanovka, and in the village of Panasovka, two years after his birth, the Mechnikov family built a house. We initiated the creation of the Ilya Mechnikov Museum at the Center for Children and Youth Creativity,” says the head of the museum, Lyudmila Babai.

I would like to hope that the museum will develop and there will be a place in it for the outstanding ancestors and relatives of Ilya Ilyich. And they are also interesting, because this family traces its origins to the Morean branch of the Palaiologos and Moldavian boyars.

Nicolae Milescu-Spafari is an encyclopedist and polyglot who came to the service of Tsar Alexei Mihailovich and later became the first Russian ambassador to China. This family's service to the Moscow tsars began with him.

Grandson of Nicholas Gheorghe (Yuri Stefanovich), who received asylum after the Prut campaign of 1711. and translated the surname Spataru (Spafariy) as “Mechnikov”. Then Peter the Great did not give his Moldavian allies into the clutches of the Janissaries, but made them Russian nobles without delay. He was the first to settle in Slobozhanshchina

Evgraf Ilyich Mechnikov - senator, privy councilor and mining engineer, great-grandfather of Ilya Ilyich. It was he who found gold deposits in the Urals and developed a plan for the infrastructure of Transcaucasia.

Also interesting are the older brothers of the Nobel laureate—the sociologist and geographer Lev Ilyich and Ivan Ilyich—the prototype of the hero of L. N. Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”

By the way, Ilya Ilyich repeatedly met with Lev Nikolaevich, both were fond of a healthy lifestyle, only, unlike the great writer, he promoted fermented milk products and did not abuse vegetarianism.

So in Dvurechnaya there is every chance to create an object that will be useful to local residents and interesting for tourists. If only it had more history than ethnography.