Collection of scythian and sarmat gold exhibited in Bashkiria

The exhibition "Gold Deer of Eurasia" will present the collection of Scythian and Sarmat gold for the first time in Bashkiria (a federal republic in the Urals).

According to Murat Kiyekbayev, the director of the Ufa ethnologic centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the last batch of the gold collection was delivered by plane to Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria, from the St. Petersburg's Hermitage. Unprecedented security measures are taken, because the collection costs 100 million dollars.

The opening ceremony will take place at the Mikhail Nesterov museum in Ufa on June 9. State Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky, Bashkir Deputy Prime Minister Khalyaf Ishmuratov and professor Anatoly Pshenichnyuk, the head of the archaeology department at the Ufa Institute of History, Language and Literature, will attend the ceremony. In 1988 an expedition, headed by professor Pshenichnyuk, discovered more than 600 articles of ancient Sarmats, including 26 gold deer figures, in the north of the Orenburg region (8 deer figures were in a poor condition).

According to Murat Kiyekbayev, 279 of 384 articles of the Sarmat period will stay in Ufa. Two Hermitage experts arrived in Ufa to study the conditions of keeping the collection at the Nesterov museum.

The gold exhibits were shown at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and in Milan. The exhibition "Gold Deer of Eurasia" will last in Ufa till September.