The museum’s main exhibit is an excavation site with an area of 1118 square metres, in which at a depth of 4 metres you will find 28 residential and household buildings dating back to the ХІІІ century, along with 2 pavements. This is the original construction of the inner city of Biarescie on its original site. Biarescie’s ancient buildings were characterized by high density – wooden buildings located very close to one another, sometimes at a distance of only 30cm. Obviously, this is due to the fact that many Biarescie citizens wanted to live in the fortified area of the city, behind the fortification wall to protect themselves from neighbours’ attacks.
Conifers were used for the construction of buildings of Biarescie: most often pine and least often spruce. In total, during archaeological research, 224 buildings have been discovered belonging to 13 alternating constructional layers.The floors of the buildings were made of chopped wood boards. The doorways in the houses were about 1m tall. Windows were cut to the width of one beam or two adjacent beams almost under the roof. Roofs were plank. Stoves were made primarily of clay, and more rarely, with the use of bricks and stones.
The preservation of the wooden buildings of Biarescie is unusual. It was aided by the moist soil and a large amount of organic waste, which made it impossible for the air to penetrate deep into the ground. In Biarescie, archaeologists discovered two buildings of the ХІІІ century that maintain 12 timber rows, a rarity in Slavic archeology. The preservation of the buildings allows one to trace the structure of a medieval East Slavic wooden house.
Pavements determined the layout of the city and regulated its development. Wooden pavements went from northeast to southwest (left to right). They consisted of joists – longitudinal timbers laid on supports and a transverse layer of chopped wood boards. As soon as the floor got old, it was repaired or replaced with a new one, laid on top of the former. The city spreads out in all directions, evidenced by the angles of the unexposed buildings on all sides of the excavation.
In a city with a population of about 1.5–2 thousand people, there were representatives of the military that served the land-owning aristocracy, the clergy, and the merchants. The bulk of the population of Biarescie were craftsmen. The uncovered part of the inner city is definitely a handicrafts quarter. More than forty-three thousand archaeological finds under the direction of Piotr Lysienka during the exploration of the inner city of Biarescie are different and completely unique. More than a thousand of them are presented in the halls of the museum for exploration.