‘Dimitrie Gusti’ National Village Museum

The study of peasant houses began in Romania even before Artur Hazelius established Skansen in Stockholm. A selection of houses was displayed in 1867 at the international exhibition in Paris, organised by the politician Alexandru Odobescu (1834-95) who had studied archaeology in the French capital. Several exhibitions on the theme of peasant culture were arranged in the early twentieth century, and the present museum dates its origins from 1936 when it was established by Dimitrie Gusti (1880-1955), an academic sociologist and Romania’s Minster of Education in 1932-33, who had studied at Berlin and Leipzig, and pioneered the intensive study of peasant life and village communities. The museum now occupies a site of 14 ha in Herastrau Park and comprises some 360 structures, with collections of 60,000 artefacts and 250,000 documents relating to peasant life in Romania. Exhibits include numerous farmsteads, windmills, an oil press of 1794, ovens for smoking fruit, a nineteenth-century cooper’s workshop, fishing equipment in great variety, fulling mills, a pottery from Olari Horezu, notable in the early twentieth century for its high quality wares, and mining plant from the Carpathians including crushing mills and ore-washing equipment. The museum is the location for numerous theatrical productions and displays of folk dancing.