Old postcards Yalta. Glade of fairy tales

Yalta’s Glade of Fairy Tales began as one man’s hobby. After the war Pavel Bezrukov, an engineer who lived on a forest glade near the Uchan-Su waterfall, started carving fairy-tale characters beside his house, and by 1960 the glade had become a favourite outing for local people. In 1970 it was cleared and his carvings were lost; the city council then decided to open a museum on the site, and on 1 August 1970 an open-air display of sculptures prepared by Crimean artists received its first visitors as a branch of the Yalta museum of local history.

These Soviet postcards of the Glade come from a 1978 set, and most show two figures each: Buratino (the Russian Pinocchio) with the six-headed Chudo-Yudo, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain with the dragon Zmey Gorynych, Alyonushka and her brother Ivanushka with Balda and the devil from Pushkin’s tale, and Ivasyk-Telesyk with the Fox and Kolobok.

Other pairs come from epic songs and Slavic legend: Nightingale the Robber and the thunder god Perun, the bird Sirin and a sorcerer, the bard Boyan and the giant hero Svyatogor, the Swan Princess and Ivan Tsarevich with the Firebird. A giant’s head stands next to the Three Bears, while Doctor Aibolit, the gossiping forest spirits and the gnomes each have a card of their own.

Shot eight years after the museum opened, the set records the display as visitors saw it at the end of the 1970s.