Why to visit The Village Museum in Bucharest?

In this article we recommend you a few reasons for why you should spent a couple of hours in the Village Museum while you are visiting Bucharest.

The Village Museum was founded in 1936 by Royal Decree and inaugurated in the presence of the country rulers and all the politic and cultural personalities at that time. The establishment covers 14 hectares located on the shore of Lake Herăstrău, putting it on the list of the greatest outdoor museums in the Balkans.

Today the museum sums up to 346 monuments and 53450 objects organized in heritage storages, built according to the principles of modern museology. The museum is annually visited by approximately 300,000 individuals whom depending on the visiting period of the year, have the chance to participate at cultural  activities  through learning and playing.

You can find below a list of convincing aspects to visit the Village Museum as soon as the chance presents itself. We assure you that it will be a worthy experience.

Once you enter the museum, you find yourself in a small paradise of the Romanian rural life, being surrounded with traditional houses, roadside crucifixes, annexes, technical installations and a variety of items that are usually  needed in a traditional homestead.

A visit at the Village Museum is equivalent to a fast forward type of experience back in the historical time of Romanian traditional culture. The homesteads are grouped by historical provinces – Tranyslvania, Muntenia and Moldavia to which the ares of Dobrogea and Oltenia are added.

The Village Museum is considered a place that commemorates the past – the rural world – but also a place where one can satisfy their human aspiration towards beauty, knowledge, learning, entertainment and playfulness.

The museum is a place in which an individual might feel the need to return because it offers a new perspective each time – a season that blooms or fades, a celebration of a village when you have the occasion to immerse yourself for a little while into the scenery.

You definitely should spend a couple of hours in the Village Museum in Bucharest

Here you can find a place of entertainment which is different from what the town offers as for example: temporary themed exhibitions, scientific sessions, folk art fairs, demonstrations from contemporary artists, children camps designed to familiarize the kids with the various genres of the folk culture and to give them an idea about the traditional artistic crafts, folk dancing and singing performed by the peasants and professional ensembles, traditions and customs celebrating festivals.

Here people can participate to various activities together with their family and relatives, having at their disposal a place in which they can discover and practice hobbies or just a place for enjoying the atmosphere.

The monuments in the Village Museum are authentic, the buildings being transferred from the origins of the village in question and rebuilt in the museum perimeter by strictly respecting the traditional building techniques and interior decorations.

By visiting the monuments you can really understand the ingenuous methods used by man to adapt to the environment, exploiting the resources and materials at hand. According to their area of origin you can find constructions made of wood, clay and stone, covered with shingles, straw or thatch, but also buildings from more recent periods, buildings belonging to ethnic groups (Saxons, Hungarians) that use bricks for the walls and tiles or tin for the roof.

Admiring the monumental gates that stand guard at the entrance for homesteads from Maramureș area and a part of Oltenia which are considered as real works of art because of the beautifully carved decorations.

Text source: Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum Brochure

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