Museum of Time and Space

I went to the Museum of the City of Moscow today. The museum screams “Moscow” from its layout, to its friendly old ladies in the ticket office. But I find that museums can be unsettling places sometimes. Sometimes when you look at something really old you realize how little some things have actually changed.

The museum is housed in a former church, a circular pink building located in the heart of the city. The interior is a jigsaw puzzle of exhibition halls that have been shoehorned into the space. The ticket booth is on the mezzanine; the coat-check room is in the basement. The displays start on the second floor and then continue disjointedly across the first and third floors. No traces of the former interior remain at all. That’s a pretty good analogy for modern Russia sometimes – a completely different interior crammed into a shell with an older, different appearance.

One hall of the museum chronicles the dozen or so terrorist acts perpetrated in Moscow since 1996. Photos of the victims, biographies, small details of the events. It’s all well put together and touching, without any prurient glimpse at what’s now a long list of gory attacks on civilians.

The main display is an impressive collection of materials from the Stone Age up through modern times. The walls between cases are covered with beautiful oil paintings of various periods in the history of Moscow. Some are even painted by rather famous Russian artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. In fact, the artwork near the exhibits was often times superior to the display itself. After all, there are only so many stone-age arrowheads one can look at in any one dose.

But I did find one really interesting article in a case full of finds from the 9th century. Hanging in a case with impossibly old household items, above an axe-head - once obviously sturdy but now rusted into a delicate lacelike trellis – there was a belt buckle. It looked awfully familiar. Then I looked at my belt buckle and realized it was exactly the same. Exactly the same size, style – everything was precisely the same except for the quality of the finish.

And the fact that mine came from the LL Bean catalog, not an archeological dig in Moscow.

I wasn’t really prepared for the crashing confrontation with mortality that the belt buckle provoked. Standing in the museum, looking at that display, I started doing the comparison. How would my life in Moscow resemble the life of someone resident here in the 9th century? I feel confident in saying that it wouldn’t resemble it at all – maybe not even in the abstract. Yet that guy and I had the exact same belt buckle. And it was very clear that our belt buckles were going to outlast us both.

Anyway, it’s hard to believe that pant-holding-up technology hasn’t changed in more than a millennium. It’s somehow a comforting notion that, in the age of rapid technological change, maybe some things have already been perfected.