Tula Accordion Factory-Museum

In addition to the production of musical instruments, the Tula Accordion Factory’s strategy includes protection, preservation, and popularization of Russian national traditions associated with playing reed instruments. To this end, the factory invites you to visit the Accordion Museum in Tula. As it turns out, there are as many as three exhibitions dedicated to this instrument in the City of Craftsmen. The difference between this museum and others is that it is intended to showcase the production process, while the other two will tell you about the application, interesting forms and history of how the accordion was created.

The Accordion Museum located at 5^th Krivoluchenskaya St., 3 allows its visitors to learn a lot about the stages of creating the instrument and its tuning, and offers some interesting facts about the reed instruments design.

The Tula Accordion Factory has a glorious history that can inspire even those far from music. The Accordion Museum in Tula is an integral part of this history.

It is believed that the first accordion in Russia was made by a Tula citizen I.E. Sizov, who brought a German model of the instrument from the Novgorod Fair in 1830. Determined to understand the mechanism of the instrument, the gunsmith took it apart and copied it. He distributed the first copies to his friends, but then started producing and selling accordions. This is how factories producing reed instruments began to appear throughout Russia.

Before the revolution, there used to be a huge number of accordion factories of various sizes in the City of Craftsmen, but in the 1920s they were all merged into one plant. The Tula Accordion Factory produced more than half of all accordions in the USSR. In the fall of 1941, 60,000 instruments were shipped to the front. Production could not be stopped that simply, since the accordion music was of a great help to the soldiers.

In the 1950s, the accordion production in Tula was joined to the Melody Association. After that, the Tula instruments began to receive worldwide recognition and awards. In 2000, the production was renamed LLC Tula Accordion, which invites tourist groups to its accordion museum today. To register, please call: +7 (4872) 25-12-88. We are looking forward to meeting you!