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.