The professional holiday of tourist support specialists was started in 1990 and is celebrated every year on February 21 in many countries of the world. If the biblical Moses is considered the first world-famous tour guide, then Ivan Kotliarevskyi from Poltava is the "Ukrainian Moses" of the tour business.
The qualities required by this rare and unique profession are extraordinary. A person, in addition to great intelligence and unlimited memory, must possess a set of knowledge in various sciences, have excellent communication skills and skills, a high culture of speech, etc. Undoubtedly, this should be a creative person who is constantly improving and deepening his knowledge. I. Kotliarevskyi was just such a person. During the 20s and early 30s of the 19th century, he conducted the first organized tours of Poltava, the listeners of which were both high-ranking officials and well-known travelers, writers, and friends of the poet. Today, we can only guess about the greatness of Ivan Kotliarevskyi's excursion professionalism, fascinating stories, which the then residents of Poltava and guests of the city heard. Some of them were extremely lucky, even receiving a copy of the "Aeneid" as a gift from the hands of the author. At the end of his life and even after his death, the figure of the poet turns into a kind of "object" of tourist pilgrimage to the city, to his estate on the Cathedral Square of Poltava.
The role of the followers of Ivan Kotliarevskyi's excursion business is extremely important. In the list of profession classifiers, the profession "tour guide" in the modern sense of the word appears only at the beginning of the 20th century. In Poltava at that time, Ivan Pavlovskyi, the founder of the Museum of the History of the Battle of Poltava and its first director, belonged to the cohort of well-known museum workers and tour guides. The success of the museum was explained not only in the careful selection of exhibits that presented the participation of the three parties involved in the battle, but also in the perfect possession of information about them. It is not surprising that Ivan Pavlovskyi became the compiler of the first catalog of the Museum's exposition, the number of people wishing to enter it was impressive.
Mykhailo Rudynskyi, a younger contemporary of I. Pavlovskyi, was the initiator and also the first director of the Art Gallery opened in Poltava in 1919. The basis of the fine art collection was the canvases and albums of drawings by Mykola Yaroshenko, an artist from Poltava. M. Rudynskyi became the author not only of the first museum guidebook, but also of the monographic essay "Architectural face of Poltava" - an invaluable tourist and excursion description of the architectural face of the city.
The estates of the present two literary memorial museums of Volodymyr Korolenko and Panas Myrnyi passed the path of museification in the first half of the 20th century thanks to the hard work, including the excursion of close relatives of the writers, namely the daughter of Sofia Volodymyrivna and the son of Mykhailo Panasovych. Both of them formed the exposition of the museums, created in 1928 and 1940, respectively, kept a description of the funds and conducted tours until their death.
Today's excursion support specialists help to form an impression of the city, and the formation of a positive perception and general atmosphere about Poltava and the people of Poltava depends on their professional skills. We congratulate tireless popularizers of historical and cultural heritage - city tour guides - on a professional holiday. We wish professional growth and realization of new creative ideas in an independent, sovereign and successful Ukraine!
