Museum Week in Georgia: State Silk Museum

The State Silk Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia, has an extensive historical collection of sericulture. Sericulture is the cultivation of silkworms to produce silk – it is also called silk farming.

The ancient Caucasian species of silkworm became extinct in the 1860s, when Pébrine, a silkworm disease, spread across Europe. In reaction to the limited supply of silk, the Caucasian Sericulture Station was founded in Tbilisi in 1887. Nikolay Shavrov (1858-1915), a member of the Moscow Agricultural Imperial Society, led the centre. The chief purpose of the Sericulture Station was to promote enhanced facilities for silk cultivation.

The young scientist and naturalist, Nikolay Shavrov, was dispatched to Transcaucasia in 1881 to study and develop sericulture and to contribute to the arrangements made for an art and industrial exhibition in Russia. In 1884 Shavrov went abroad to enrich his knowledge and returned in 1886. He submitted a plan to the minister for founding the Caucasian Sericulture Station in Tbilisi to the minister. His valuable collections, that he brought to Tbilisi, contributed to the foundation of the Silk Museum and library.

In 1996 the building (built between 1890-1892) was listed as a historical monument. Architect Alexander Szymkiewicz, of Polish heritage, who worked in Tbilisi, designed the building as well as other public and residential buildings in Tbilisi in the second half of the 19th century (including the Rustaveli Theatre). The building has a plain red brick façade, a large portico attached to the middle projection, and a mansard roof covering the central part.

From 1998 to 2005 the museum and the library were transferred to the Sericulture Coordination Centre, Silk House, subordinated to the Ministry of Agriculture. In 2006, for the first time throughout its long history, the museum became an independent entity.

The State Silk Museum has a collection of samples silk threads, cloth, carpets, and wallpaper – and dyes. It also has a model loom for ribbon weaving, a cone winding tool, a horizontal weaving loom, a vertical loom, and a punch card for a jacquard loom. It has 314 species of butterfly samples from 161 species, as well as a herbarium of different mulberry tree species, including a 4.5 metre-long root from a mulberry tree. The collection features an extensive display of cocoons from Japan, China, Korea, India, Bengal, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Greece, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Corsica, and France, as well as the Caucasus.

And it has its own live silk worms.

At the time of the visit, there was an international conference and workshops from 15-20 May to mark 130 years of the State Silk Museum. In collaboration with the Norwegian company, Tronrud Engineering, the TC-2 jacquard loom will be on display in the Silk Museum until the end of August.

www.silkmuseum.ge

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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