Romanian Peasant Museum

The expositions hosted by the Romanian Peasant Museum tell the story of the Romanian peasants, showing their traditional working techniques passed on from one generation to the next, as well as their old, traditional outfits.

The Museum’s headquarters is located in Victoriei Square in Bucharest, next to the „Grigore Antipa“  Natural Science Museum  and the Geology Museum. The Romanian Peasant Museum is operating in a historic building, constructed between 1912 and 1941 and it comprises numerous collections of high traditional and cultural value.

The Romanian Peasant Museum, which is a National Museum of Arts and Traditions, holds the widest collection of peasant-related items in Romania. It has nearly 90,000 items in its patrimony, which are 90,000 witnesses telling the story of the Romanian rural culture, helping today’s population understand that culture.

The Museum has impressive ceramics collections (about 18,000 items coming from places like Horezu, Oboga, Vama, Pisc, Curtea de Argeş, Leheceni, Lăpuș etc.) and the oldest one  dates back to 1746.  It also has clothing collections, with almost 20,000 traditional outfit items, from all over Romania, as well as traditional wall carpet collections made of hemp, cotton and silk, wooden item collections and wool fabrics.

Glass and wood painted icons, icon registers, woodcut pieces, priest outfits, vessels and other religious items, as well as large outdoor crosses and smaller crosses make up the religious collection of this Museum, comprising almost 4,000 pieces.

A tour round the Romanian Peasant Museum is like a trip back in time, helping us understand the rural culture and appreciate true values.

Due to its original and creative way of laying out its items, the Museum was granted a EMYA –  European Museum of the Year Award in 1996.