Touristic Sites

The „Dimitrie Gusti” National Village Museum

17 May 1936 has great significance in the history of the Romanian museums: It is marked as the opening day of the Romanian Village Museum, an event that took place in the presence of the country's leaders and of all the political and cultural personalities of those times. Nowadays called the "Dimitrie Gusti" National Village Museum, it was named after its most important creator, a school founder and a charismatic scholar – Dimitrie Gusti. It was his idea to set up the Village Museum after having organized, between 1925 and 1935, at the Sociology Department of the University of Bucharest, a series of interdisciplinary researches in over 600 villages from various regions of Romania.

Concerned with finding suitable land for setting up the future museum, Professor Dimitrie Gusti and his close collaborators accepted the proposal to "organize it in the Carol II Park, in an area covering 4,500 square meters, on the banks of the Baneasa Lake, which had been recently diked, for the festivities of the "Month of Bucharest" to be held in that same year". The "Prince Carol" Royal Cultural Foundation provided moral and material support to the project. The task of designing the museum was assigned to H. H. Stahl and Victor Ion Popa. It was supposed to be more than just a collection of houses aligned or crowded in an outdoor space, but rather "a museum village",... a unique representation of a real-life village, with its streets, and plantations and wells and markets.

29 houses, a wooden church from Maramures, five wind mills, one water mill, an oil press, a distiller, an installation for preparing and conserving fish and other annexes which summed up everything that could be normally found in a village, were all transported and reinstalled on the territory where the museum lies today. The museum was opened to the public on May 9th, 1936 and received the name the Romanian Village Museum. The opening ceremony was attended by King Carol II and by members of the government, and the place was blessed by the Romanian Patriarch of that time.

In 1948, Professor Gheorghe Focşa, the second greatest personality founder of the museum, an active participant in monographic research and close friend of Dimitrie Gusti, carried on the course of action set by Gusti, but transformed the Museum from a sociological one into an ethnographic museum. Unique monuments of high originality were brought to the museum. With these, the Village Museum completed its image, becoming an exceptional institution, not only a special part of the City of Bucharest, but also a paradigm-museum on a national and international scale.

Currently, the Museum has a collection of 350 monuments which form up the permanent exhibition and 55,000 objects organized in heritage depositories, built to meet the principle of modern museology. The Village Museum has become a school where many children take pleasure in the study of “live” history, a school of museology acknowledged in the country as well as abroad, and a center for research and documentation on traditional life. The National Village Museum has become, over time, one of the most important centers for the research, restoration and preservation of the cultural heritage, a model to be followed by many out-door museums and a place where craftsmen come every year to demonstrate the vitality and validity of peasant creation in the midst of the modern landscape and the tumult of the big city.

Loved by the people of Bucharest and by foreigners alike (approximately 350,000 people visit the museum every year), admired by most personalities who have passed through Bucharest - the Village Museum has celebrated its 75th year of existences in 2011. Nowadays it ranks among the most important cultural institutions in the country, harboring a precious and original thesaurus of monuments and objects, of great value for the identity of Romanians as a nation, and, at the same time, carrying out educational programs dedicated to children and to the young generation as well as to adults and seniors.

The current projects carried out within the Village Museum are quite extensive, propelling the institution towards a larger cooperation with museums all over the world. Since 2010 the museum development project has been put into practice, by the adding 3.5 ha of land. This land is meant to be used for the placement of new monuments rescued from their original sites, but also for the illustration of the concept of "museum vivum". It is a project that shall offer the public of Bucharest a place where it can actually experience live "country life". Plans are to have a functional church, a school where lessons will impart knowledge on village life, history, ethnology; a playground - the place where children will experience an encounter with the traditional games that revealed the beauty and yet effectiveness of a world where a child was educated in close connection to his environment, to real people, to nature, bonding with it in harmony and respect. “Story night” held in a house relocated from Maramures, shall rekindle the charm of the evenings spent with grandma and grandpa, by the fire, telling tales about to be forgotten. This is how we wish to bring back to life the atmosphere of the old times, of country life, when “all was right in the world”.

We keep in close contact to the public, we test its preferences, we develop specialized programs and, by doing this, we try to attract visitors of all ages and social categories. To this end, the programs address a comprehensive category of the public. For children, we have developed programs such as: Discovering the Old Crafts, From Folk Art to Plastic Art, Discovering Rural Communities, Creative Camps, for grown-ups: Craftsmen’s Fair, Holidays and Customs in the Folk Calendar, Christmas and New Year's Eve Customs and Traditions Festival, Days Celebrating Each Region Represented in the Museum, Folk Music Concerts etc. We honor and encourage craftsmen by organizing Exhibitions and Medallions, discovery of new talents, radio and TV shows. As a special feature, there are programs designed for disabled persons.

Inside the premises of the National Village Museum, one will encounter an exceptional architectural, technical and artistic heritage, a presentation of traditional technologies, most of which have disappeared, a modernized infrastructure, and all these elements contribute to making this museum in downtown Bucharest one that can proudly stand alongside the great museums of Europe. It is safe to say that among the cultural institutions from Bucharest and from the country, the "Dimitrie Gusti" National Village Museum is acknowledged as a dynamic and modern institution that currently ranks first in Romania in terms of number of visitors.






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