A “Museum of trolleybus tickets” was opened in Kyiv (Prorizna street, 21). This is no joke. Its initiators wanted to create something that didn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and it seems they succeeded. So far the collection comprises around a hundred trolleybus (trolleybus only!) tickets from different countries (Portugal, Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia, Poland, etc.), but their work is far from over.
“We rejoice over each new ticket and are ready to reward it [in whatever way we can]. It turns out that people who collect tickets are willing to cooperate – perhaps they would exchange their ticket for something else. We place every ticket in a special frame, and the person writes his or her name under it. The oldest tickets we have are Soviet tickets from the 1960s, which were kept by Kyivans that do not collect them. We ask people who bring us tickets about where they got them, and we hear interesting stories. We did not expect that people would support our wish to create a museum,” the museum’s founder Oleksandr TODORCHUK told The Day.
According to him, people who have a hobby of collecting things used to collect stamps, coins, etc. when they were children, and now they enrich their collections in such a way. However, there are a few people who live on this alone.
“Our collector from Kharkiv, who collects only trolleybus tickets (most collectors gather different tickets – trolleybus, and bus and tram as well) and who agreed to send us tickets — he sent them not in a usual envelope (as there was so much paper), but in a parcel post: each ticket was wrapped in a file. I thought it was some odd fellow, but he turned out to be a normal 35-year-old man with an unusual hobby,” Oleksandr reminisces.
It is likely that the museum’s collection will be able to grow further in the future, as trolleybuses, a particularly ecological form of public transportation, are likely to be increasingly used around the world.
