Perm Regional Museum, Regional history museum in Perm, Russia

The Perm Regional Museum occupies the Meshkov House on Monastyrskaya Street, a mansion the museum moved into in 2009. Its collection of about 600,000 items spans more than 50 regional, Russian and international collections, including archaeology, fossils from the Chekarda site, and local crafts. The museum also manages 22 historical and cultural monuments and nine branches across Perm Krai.

The museum traces its origin to a November 1890 meeting of the Perm commission of the Ural Society of Natural Science Lovers, founded in Yekaterinburg in 1870. It opened to the public on 25 January 1894 on Pokrovskaya Street and moved to Petropavlovskaya Street in 1897, when it became the Perm Scientific and Industrial Museum. In 2007 it took its current name, and in 2009 it reopened in the Meshkov House.

The museum's name changed with its fortunes: it became the Perm Scientific and Industrial Museum after the 1897 move, the Perm Regional Museum of Local Lore in 1957, and took its current name in 2007. Its branches, from the Khokhlovka open-air architecture and ethnography museum to the Osinsky local history museum, carry regional folk culture beyond the main building.

The main building is the Meshkov House at Monastyrskaya Street 11, on the left bank of the Kama in the city centre. The museum also runs branches elsewhere in Perm and the region, among them the Museum of Perm Antiquities on Sibirskaya Street 15 and the Khokhlovka open-air complex outside the city, so check which site you are heading for before setting out.

Among the museum's holdings is one of the largest collections of Perm Animal Style objects, small metal figures made by Ural peoples over 1,000 years ago. These pieces show animals in unusual hybrid forms and are largely unknown outside Russia.