Europe's Largest Open-Air Museum (1)

It sounds strange that a small country can claim to have the biggest something. Strange but true. The country where I live and where I usually travel (much less than I'd like, unfortunately), can boast a few such maxims.

The largest administrative building in Europe (second in the world, after Pentagon). I don't want to write about this building now. I recently visited something much more spectacular and useful. Europe's largest open-air museum.

The country is Romania, located somewhere in the east of Europe, very close (I mean neighbor) to a country that is very much in trouble now and that everybody has heard about, namely Ukraine.

The museum I will tell you about now is called Astra and is located in Sibiu, a small but beautiful city in the center of Romania, in the region called Transylvania. Transylvania may be known to some film-loving readers because it is considered the land of Dracula.

On the outskirts of Sibiu, that is to say, ten minutes away by car, hidden in a beautiful and extensive forest, we find the ASTRA museum.

This is an ethnographic museum, which means that it is a museum that hosts old things from all the regions of the country, i.e. houses, means of work, furniture, peasant art objects, and clothing. A place where old houses (with everything they had inside) are brought from all over the country and rebuilt in a space identical to the one they were taken from.

A short three-day holiday in Sibiu was so full of walks and museum visits that I collected hundreds of photos that helped me write a lot about this place.

I started the series of posts about the Astra Museum with an exhibition of folk shirts: A Link Between Past, Present, And Perhaps Future. I ended this post with a floral arrangement right at the entrance to the open-air museum.

These flowers will form the link between these posts, as I intend to do a series of presentations of this museum in chronological order of the visit I made.

Passing through the museum gates, the first image that strikes the eye is that of the lake. A vast lake in the middle of the forest! An unexpected and very beautiful image.

What could be more pleasant than sitting on a wooden bench made of tree trunks, a classic peasant design?

The beauty of the place, suddenly seen, takes not only the breath away but also the legs and you have to sit down. A short rest and then the obligatory information. Luckily there is a map of the museum and I was able to make the route of this visit.

I always have to choose. When there are two directions.

This time it was easy because we wanted to do a full visit, and the left direction excluded an important part of the museum... so, we went right, through the forest!

We saw the first houses hidden behind trees in the forest. Well hidden, barely visible.

I started this journey, I could say, through the past of my country shown with the help of peasant architecture, with the help of the houses where our grandparents and great-grandparents lived. In this area are exposed the houses of the hills and mountains...

These are beautiful homes and could also provide comfort during this time. What is more unpleasant is that they are some houses where there is not much natural light inside because of the small windows. This small window opening can be explained both by the need to keep warm and for protection.

The building material is obviously wood. Most easily found in wooded areas.

The peasants were all believers. They lived in harsh conditions and often appealed to the deity for protection or to give thanks when they achieved something important. They also made art out of wood, and such crosses were placed next to the houses on which different information, requests, or advice were engraved.

The houses of the wealthiest had a more special architecture, with the bottom part built of stone. This part was harder for strangers to reach and also kept the temperature low, good for preserving food. The living rooms were located above and were made of wood.

Other houses were smaller and rudimentary, houses of the neighboring nationalities, mainly Roma. These Gypsies were slaves and after liberation, they became craftsmen, especially blacksmiths. Their houses were almost buried in the ground.

The beauty of this museum is that it shows the houses with their courtyards and outbuildings where the tools were kept as well as the stables where the animals were raised. The generous space in this forest allows the exact replication of the households.

Some exhibits are not yet ready to be visited. They are in preservation, I don't know why, maybe because they couldn't find enough exhibits specific to that household or maybe the roof is not finished.

Another house in the same situation.

Here I saw something that interests me a lot. A clay oven where bread was made. I would like to make a similar one at home. I remember from my childhood that my grandmother had a similar one and that she used to make an extraordinarily tasty bread, as it doesn't exist anymore.

Another house, that is, the entire household, caught my attention. That's because I've seen many similar ones in different villages around the country. It looks very up-to-date.

If so far we have seen houses relatively far away from each other, we have also arrived in a kind of clearing or village square, with many houses next to each other.

A pattern of houses closer to the plain.

You can swear you're in a real village and the visitors seem to be the villagers who live there. At the end of this little village square, there is something you can't miss in any village in Romania. A church. A wooden church!

It is a very special exhibit and deserves a special presentation. This will be the next post because there is a lot to show.

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