Museum-Tourist Center, consisting of the Gingerbread Museum and the Chocolate Workshop

Several years ago, Alexander Gorev and Irina Zherebkina could not even have imagined that they would create their own museum. The married couple was engaged in trade: tea, coffee, pies, and gingerbread cookies. Then they started selling handmade Pokrovsky gingerbread cookies and the goods went off with a bang. They became regulars at all city mass events. For the first time at the Vladimir Cherry Festival, they arranged a master class for children on the painting of this traditional Russian delicacy. People were surprised and pleased and they themselves were surprised how popular this was. It was a success not only with children, but also with adults. There were suggestions that it be repeated on City Day, at the Festival of Love and Fidelity in Murom, and they received invitations from event agencies to children’s parties. Individual orders for celebrations appeared. Demand, as you know, creates supply, and so appeared in Vladimir, at Bolshaya Moskovskaya Street, 40, “The Gingerbread House”.

By that time, Irina and Alexander themselves were so carried away by the history of the gingerbread in Russia that they began to collect not only the gingerbreads themselves, but also things without which they could not be baked: stamped gingerbread boards, a book of old recipes, and a mortar with millstones. They collected gingerbread cookies of all shapes and colors, gingerbread houses, edible Christmas toys, and even the edible gingerbread alphabet: both useful and interesting for children. All these became the exhibits of the future museum.

In 2014, the first interactive project “The Gingerbread Museum” came to life. This is a place where you can plunge into the history of gingerbread, learn about Russian traditions, and attend unique workshops on painting stamped gingerbread using a recipe which is more than 300 years old!

Every day we were driven by the dedication and gratitude of the inhabitants of Vladimir and tourists, so we continued on, opening and introducing new directions and projects.

The project “The Chocolate Workshop” appeared, then a network of souvenir shops, our own annual festival “Gingerbread Day”, and the social project “Best Student”. All these projects, like jigsaw puzzles, developed into the Museum-Tourist Center.

We can proudly declare that in over 5 years of work, we have become an integral part and brand of the city of Vladimir, one of the main sites, and the most popular place for family leisure. Thousands of tourists come especially to visit us!

We rightly consider ourselves a center that promotes traditions and cultural values. Unique museum master classes attract both children and adults. Cognitive excursions immerse them into the world of interesting and fascinating history. Over the five years of its existence, the Gingerbread Museum and the Chocolate Workshop have been visited by tens of thousands of residents and guests of the city!