Gallery of rare collections to open in Elabuga
A real gift for residents and guests of Yelabuga will be the Gallery of Rare Collections, which opens on the eve of the New Year as part of the Yelabuga State Museum-Reserve.
The gallery will start its work with the collection “Pages of the Koran” belonging to the scribe and restorer of handwritten books from Ufa D.G. Akhmatgaliev. The acquaintance of the EGMZ employees with Damir Galievich took place in March 2018, when exposition of the Korans and Shamails was open at the Exhibition Hall. This fall, he and his wife moved to Yelabuga to work as an artist-restorer in the museum-reserve.
The first exhibition in the gallery will feature pages (replicas) of the holy book of Muslims, written on the skin of a gazelle in Hijazi and Kufi handwriting. These are fragments of Korans from Andalusia (Spain), North and Central Africa, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Central Asia, Dagestan, India, China, the Malay Peninsula, Russia. Visitors will be able to trace how the handwriting and design of the Quran changed from the end of the 7th century to the present day.
Information about Damir Akhmatgaliev
After graduating from the Moscow Art School in Memory of 1905, shortly before the collapse of the USSR, Damir Akhmatgaliev was assigned to work at the State Architecture and Art Museum-Reserve of the city of Bukhara. The local curator of the library, Ishon Hazrat, taught the young man the basics of Islam. Having studied the Arabic language while still in Moscow, Damir was engaged in the restoration of ancient Korans, written in different calligraphic handwritings and decorated in the style of different countries and historical eras.
The gallery of rare collections is located in a historic building on Naberezhnaya Street, where the Museum-Workshop of Decorative and Applied Arts was previously located.