New Chersoneses - The museum-church complex in Sevastopol

Chersonesos was an ancient Greek colony founded approximately 2,500 years ago in the southwestern part of the Crimean Peninsula. Settlers from Heraclea Pontica in Bithynia established the colony in the 6th century BC. The ancient city was located on the shore of the Black Sea on the outskirts of present-day Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula, where it is referred to as Khersones. The site is part of the National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos. The name Chersonesos in Greek means "peninsula." The new Chersoneses is adjacent to the ruins of the ancient city of Chersonesos. It took one year and 8 months to construct the entire complex - an amazingly short time, that includes 6.5 million artifacts from ancient and Byzantine times. The museum-church complex, “New Chersoneses” represents an entirely new level of organization for historical, museum, educational, leisure, and cultural spaces not only in Russia but also worldwide. The buildings and structures, with a total area of 140,000 square meters, (459,317 square feet) are located on  24  hectares (55 acres) of landscaped territory transformed into a unique garden-park ensemble. As a result, a true Byzantine city has emerged next to ancient Chersonese, impressing visitors with its scale and beauty. The main centers of “New Chersoneses” are three museums: Christianity, Antiquity and Byzantium, and Crimea and Novorossiya. We visited The Museum of Crimea and Novorossiya which was the only one of the three that was opened.