MUSEM OF MINERALOGY AND PETROGRAPHY
The Museum of Mineralogy and Petrography at the Department of geology of the Georgian Technical University has existed for seven tens of years. According to mineralogical and petrological exhibits the educational-demonstration Museum of Mineralogy and Petrography may be considered as one of the rich and versatile museums in the Ciscaucasus. There are exhibited metallic and nonmetallic minerals, rock-forming minerals and their paragenic associations, precious and semiprecious stones, facing and building stones from the deposits (and their certain parts) in Georgia, republics of the former Soviet Union and foreign countries. In the Museum of Mineralogy an Petrography there are kept system collections of minerals and rocks nearly from all the world-known deposits and regions, geochemical and genetic collections of minerals and principal minerals of some metals; there are exhibited models of crystalline lattices and of natural crystals of certain minerals.
The Museum is open not only to the students and schoolchildren but to all persons interested in minerals and rocks.
The Museum was founded in 1940 in the building of the Tbilisi Industrial Institute. It occupied only one room where the mineral collections were exhibited in eight small showcases.
In 1952 the Mining Department moved to a specially built new building and the Museum was disposed on the area it occupies at present. It was the beginning of the following development and supplement of the Museum by new samples of various minerals and rocks.
For years the mineral and rock collections were replenished by the centralized way – giving an order to geological expeditions, but lots of samples were presented by former students that worked at famous ore deposits of different countries in the last century. During the field trips the research workers and students of the Department sampled training material, collected interesting samples of minerals and rocks. Geological expeditions and field trainings were carried out not only on the territory of Georgia but in geologically interesting regions of the former Soviet Union, Europe and the USA.
At present the Museum occupies three large halls where the exhibited material is subjected to renovation and reexamination; in the end it will be a unique scientific-educational museum in the Sciscaucasus. There are about 5000 samples thematically distributed in the showcases. The Museum has rich assets of great educational importance; there are kept more then 12 thousand samples of minerals, rocks and ores that are extensively used while carrying out laboratory courses in mineralogy, petrology and geochemistry.
There are 20 showcases in the first hall and there are exhibited about 1500 samples of minerals in them. It is a mineralogical part of the Museum representing the main basis for students in the process of learning the course in mineralogy. The mineral collections are represented by the rich multifarious material comprising samples collected in the previous years and fresh material as well.
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