The Faltaits Museum is one of the earliest local folklore museums in Greece, founded in 1964 by the poet Manos Faltaits and housed in a traditional Skyrian mansion. The collection brings together the remarkable domestic culture for which Skyros has long been known: hand-painted plates, carved wooden furniture, embroidered textiles, carnival costumes, and a trove of documents and photographs from island life over the past two centuries.
What distinguishes this museum from the typical Greek ethnographic collection is the way it is displayed — in a real Skyrian house, arranged much as a prosperous family would have arranged it, with plates covering the walls and carved chests filling the rooms. The carnival section is particularly striking, preserving the costumes and bells used in the famous Goat Dance ritual, an extraordinary survival of pre-Christian tradition that the island still performs every year before Lent.