The presentation of the route took place on World Mailbox Day – August 2. The date recalls the installation of the first such container in London in 1858. Well, in Voronezh there is an unusual commemorative sign in the form of a working mailbox cube with four letter slots and bas-reliefs reflecting the main types of delivery (land, sea, air and space). It is fixed on a milestone, a symbol of the Yamskaya persecution, near the Yamskoy hotel-museum.
From here, tourists are invited to start the search. Its passage will take about two hours. Instructions are given to everyone at the reception, information about the sights can be obtained via a QR code that leads to the project page on the Internet. We are planning to develop an audio guide.
The route is designed for independent travelers and does not require special expenses. Those who do not have a car or bicycle must pay for public transport: the distance between the extreme points is about 10 kilometers. In addition, you need to buy, in fact, only the AR postcard “Hello from Voronezh”. By reading the code on the back with a smartphone, the guest will be able to watch an animated video about the history of the mailbox in Russia. A photo with a card in each of the four locations, posted in VK under the hashtag #post_kvest-3, will confirm that you have completed all the tasks. The prize is an electronic certificate.
Voronezh’s postal history spans more than four centuries. The boxes, that is, the stations where the racehorses and inns were kept, appeared here at the end of the 16th century and functioned until the beginning of the 20th. Coachman settlements grew up around it. Regular communication between Voronezh and Moscow was established by order of Peter the Great in 1700. This was necessary for operational control of the construction of the navy at local shipyards. Since the end of the 18th century, the most important Caucasian track passed through the region (it was also called Pochtovy Zadonsky).
– At the disposal of the postmen there were interchangeable horses, carriages and a protective escort. In the 1780s, a provincial post office was built on the main street of Voronezh – Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya (now Prospekt Revolyutsii). The main post office stands in the same place to this day, and near it there is a monument to the front-line postman, the author of the search path recalled: traveler, travel marketer, member of the Geographical Society Russian Valery Sushkov. – Interest in postal history is growing. Since 2020, within the framework of the Postaventura project, a direction such as philately has been developing, that is, trips along routes with an emphasis on philately. Participants get acquainted with exotic types of postal services (for example, falcon mail in the Moscow region, bee mail in the Zadonsky district of the Lipetsk region) and places where famous Russian travelers, navigators and scientists lived. For example, in the Zadonsk region, a search route for a weekend family tour has been developed. In Voronezh, the target audience of the search is schoolchildren from eight to 16 years old.
The private museum of the postal service occupies three small rooms on st. Antonova-Ovseenko, 25a and is open to the public. For individual access (relatively speaking, “from the street”), it is enough to contact a hotel employee; for a group visit, an appointment is required. Among the exhibits are authentic postcards and stamps from different eras, old household items, suitcases and travel boxes, horse harnesses and bells. The stands present interesting facts about the organization of the postal business in pre-revolutionary Russia and the peculiarities of national horsemanship.
– In our understanding, the coachman is the one who drove all three horses, but in fact he was a special type of service people who were selected with all responsibility, – said the deputy director of the hotel Natalya Strutinskaya. -The coachman took an oath that he would not drink or steal. He had to follow certain rules. As you know, people in Russia love speed, foreigners were even afraid to ride our postal troikas. The coachmen warned of his approach with a gallant whistle. There were attempts to introduce other methods, for example, a copper forge, but they did not take root. Instead of horns, they served bells under an arch. Only coachmen could hang them, everyone else used bells. The harness method – troika – is unique. There were a great many wagons: carriage, wagon, tarantass, wagon, charaban, wagon, pram, sleigh, convertible… Coachmen transported not only letters, but also people, changing horses at the stall. seasons: hence the expression “riding the buggy”. The main thing was not to forget to issue a travel document; without it, the trip could become prohibitively expensive due to fines.
The museum recreates the atmosphere of a bath for wealthy guests (postal stations figured out how to earn money on additional services, which became the prototype of hotels) and the postmaster’s office. Under a glass on the table – samples of pre-revolutionary correspondence. Some visitors use them to compose their message to relatives and draw with a fountain pen something like “Dear Sir, I am writing to you from glorious Voronezh …”
At first, only guests admired the exhibits and voluntarily sent postcards through the hotel mail. He once operated a similar one in the alpine resorts of Switzerland and Austria. Now the audience is expanding. The other day, for example, a group of children from a kindergarten visited the museum. They dressed up as a toy coachman and learned to sign postcards.
– We have a long-term project for high school students in our plans – we want to draw attention to the culture of epistolary communication. We will implement it together with a partner organization. It seems to us that it is important for a modern person to retain the desire and ability to write letters by hand,” Strutinskaya emphasized. – There are calligraphy courses in the Nelzha family recreation park in the Ramonsky district, and we will focus on what we write. It is not like with a text message: it is written and deleted if you did not like it. Here you need to concentrate, get into a certain state of mind.
