Impressions after visiting the Irkutsk Local History Museum - Memories of Siberia through time and space

The moment I stepped into the Irkutsk Local History Museum, it was as if I had opened a door to the soul of Siberia. This museum, which has a history of more than 200 years, unfolds a magnificent scroll spanning nature, humanity and suffering to me with silent display cabinets, mottled cultural relics and solidified light and shadow.

In the "Siberian Nature" exhibition hall, the depth and purity of Lake Baikal come to my face. The bird specimens displayed in the glass cabinets and the mammoth skeletons excavated from the deep strata all tell the antiquity and mystery of this land. Standing in front of the quaint display counter, I suddenly realized that humans are just a speck of dust on this planet - Lake Baikal has taught me what "eternity" is with its 25 million years of existence.

Then I saw the shaman drums of the Buryats, the animal skin robes sewn by the Evenks, the birch bark totems of the Tungus tribe... These exhibits have shed the stereotypes in textbooks and show the wisdom of the Siberian indigenous people to coexist with nature. What touched me most was a group of sacrificial masks, whose hideous lines clearly flowed with awe for the gods of mountains and rivers. When modern people conquer nature with technology, these ancient peoples use faith to communicate with it. This contrast is thought-provoking.

When I left, the sunset was gilding the red brick spire of the Polish church. This building, which once imprisoned exiles, now guards the memory of the entire Siberia. Perhaps the most precious thing about the museum is not the cultural relics themselves, but the fact that it allows us to touch the temperature of history: the cold wind of Lake Baikal, the white frost blown by the exiles on the window lattices, the crackling sound of the indigenous people's bonfires... These fragments finally pieced together a revelation-civilization has never been a story of conquest, but an epic of countless lives and lands in dialogue.