STAMFORD — Alexander Kundin, Irene Goncharova and their three children consider themselves travelers before they are collectors.
Still, on the walls of their North Stamford home, just a few hundred feet from the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, there hangs a trove of collectibles: Hundreds of plates amassed from countries around the world. They populate cork boards that encirlce the room — a multicultural collage of novelty dishware.
The Kundins‘ collection of souvenir plates was numbered at 628 and awarded a Guinness Book of World Records certificate in 2012. Now, Alex speculated, the size of the collection has almost doubled and plans to reapply to Guinness with a record-breaking 1,111 plates are in order.
The Kundins’ middle son, Michael, 17, has begun touring the plates for educational purposes, giving presentations recently at the Waveny LifeCare Network and at Northeast Elementary School in Stamford. A backyard shed may become a museum of sorts, open to school groups and other interested parties free of charge, pending approval from the city.
Alex and Irene grew up in the Soviet Union at a time when travel outside of the country was mostly prohibited. It wasn’t until two years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union that the boarders opened enough for Alex to make a trip Prague with a Christian organization he was affiliated with at the time.
“Even if it was legal to travel, the thing is, in the country there was no way to change money. So yeah, you can travel, but you cannot convert your rubles for dollars, or Deutschmarks or whatever,” Alexander said.
At the end of his trip to Prague, just before boarding a train back to the Soviet Union, Alex stopped into a gift shop to spend his remaining 10 Czech korunas. He asked the cashier at the gift shop what he could buy with the money and was pointed in the direction of the decorative plates. He bought two: One, a gift for his parents, the other, the first in what has become a collection of more than 1,000 plates.
Around the end of the Cold War, Alexander and Irene were married, had kids, and began traveling more regularly, both for business and for pleasure, adding plates to their collection at every stop and developing a criteria for their collection.
“When you say to people, ‘It’s a collection of plates,’ it does not give you any information, what it’s all about or what the plates look like. We have our own requirements for ourselves, what we take, what we don’t,” Irene said.
“The name of the place should be written on the plate,” Alex continued. Or, he said, the landmark depicted should be so unique — the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Great Wall of China — so as to clearly identify the plate’s country of origin. “The picture of the Taj Mahal, for example, is so unique that even if it is not written, you can say, ‘This is the Taj Mahal,’” Alex said.
The ideal plate for the Kundins purposes has the name of the city written and pictures of four or five of its major attractions. Irene gave the example of a Parisian plate hanging on the wall of the living room depicts the Eiffel Tower prominently in the foreground, with images of Notre Dame, the Moulin Rouge, the Arc de Triomphe and the Sacre Coeur surrounding — a fine example of souvenir platesmanship in her eyes.
Irene estimated that 90 percent of the plates are made of porcelain, though other materials turn up occasionally. One especially sinister looking plate in red and black was made of volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius and depicts the peak spewing fire ominously over Pompeii. A hand-carved wooden plate bearing the name “Myanmar” was commissioned by Alex from a roadside plate-maker while on a business trip to the Southeast Asian country.
At this point, the Kundins collection includes plates from 120 countries worldwide, 54 of 55 European countries and all 50 of the United States. And although their collection continues to grow, Alex, Irene and Michael made it clear that they prioritize experiencing cultures over bolstering their collection.
“Collecting plates is never a mission. We’re more after the adventure of traveling,” Irene said.
justin.papp@scni.com; newcanaanewsonline.com
https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Around-the-world-in-1-000-plates-7246073.php