Village Museum

Open-air museum with traditional buildings from every region of Romania

Address Șoseaua Kiseleff 28-30, Bucharest

One of Europe's first and finest open-air ethnographic museums, spread across 30 acres on the shore of Lake Herăstrău. Over forty traditional buildings — log cabins, churches, watermills, thatched barns, fishermen's huts — have been brought here from every region of Romania and reassembled with their original furnishings. A wooden church from Maramureș stands next to a half-buried sod-roof house from the Danube Delta; a Saxon barn from Transylvania faces a Wallachian summer kitchen.

It is the best introduction to Romania's rural architecture and folk traditions you will find anywhere, and a welcome contrast to the marble pomp of central Bucharest. Allow at least three hours; bring water in summer because there is little shade. The shop sells genuinely good folk craft. The museum is on Șoseaua Kiseleff, a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe.

things to do museum
A story
Founded in 1936 by the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti, who sent teams of researchers into every region of Romania to identify the most representative houses, dismantle them, and reassemble them on the shore of Lake Herăstrău. The whole undertaking was completed in less than two months — 60 buildings in 50 days.