Barentsburg Pomor Museum

The Barentsburg Pomor Museum is a small museum located in Barentsburg, a town in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Created during the 1920s by the Dutch, the coal mining settlement was sold to the Soviet Union in 1932, and so it was the USSR which founded museum in 1963. Today owned entirely by the Government of Russia through Arktikugol, Barentsburg is a shadow of its former self, with only a few hundred inhabitants compared to over a thousand during its heyday. The museum remains intact however, receiving most of its visitors in the form of tourists. It shares the same building as the town's Sports and Culture Centre.When formed in 1963, one of the museum's co-founders was Vadim F. Starkov, a Soviet archaeologist from the USSR Academy of Sciences and a prominent figure in the archaeology of Svalbard. The primary subject of the museum is, as the name indicates, the Pomors, inhabitants of the White Sea who feature heavily in the archipelago's history. Starkov held that these hunters were the first discoverers of Svalbard, not Willem Barentsz, a point of view which the museum pursues as well.