Astra Museum - Sibiu - Winter 2009

By Holiday Master • January 19, 2009

A great surprise that I had on my last vacation in Sibiu was visiting the ASTRA Museum of Traditional Folk Civilization. On the first of January 2009, after a great New Year’s Eve, we decided to have a relaxing walk on the paths of Astra Museum. This walk turned out to be a delight for our eyes and souls.
Built up between 1963 and 1989, as the most elaborate scientific-documentary and technical collection and archives (pictures, photos, films) dealing with pre-industrial folk technology in Romania, the museum offers a brilliant demonstration of life and material continuity in this part of Europe. 340 country houses had been brought here from all over the country, with original sets of furniture, tools of handicraftsman and former means of transportation. Combining this with the splendid winter snow, the result is a magnificent sight.

The thematic outline of the museum - traditional folk civilization - is illustrated by:

# Traditional occupations:

fishing
bees keeping, bees waxing and candle making
animal breeding and grazing
fruit and wine growing

# Traditional folk industries:

oil pressing
miller’s trade

# Techniques and means of communication and transport

# Traditional Handicrafts:

wood processing
mineral and metal processing
pottery art

# Textile home industry and hydraulic industry for textile processing

# Social and public edifices

# Traditional buildings

# Folk art (interior decoration of the houses).

In 1990 a new thematic section was added: civil public monuments (a church, a school, an inn and a pub, a dance shed, a skittles alley).

The addition of the name “Astra” in 1993 reflected the extension and continuity in all directions of the first historic and ethnographic museum of the Transylvanian Romanians, founded in 1905 and closed in 1950 for “ideological” reasons.

Some of the most spectacular buildings are a group of windmills from the Dobrudja area, a playing area for an early form of bowling from the Paltinis monastery, a small mine from the Apuseni Mountains, a few water-mills, a wooden ferry, and a fishery from the Danube Delta. Also there are houses of shepherds, pottery workshops, iron workshops and others.

We managed to visit most of the presented thematic outlines (as you can see in the bellow photos and videos), since the whole museum is quite big:

Area: about 200 acres (100 acres in the Ethnographic Open Air Museum) - it is the largest open air museum in Romania and one of the largest in Central and Eastern Europe.
Network of paths: 10 Km
Patrimony: 115 monuments (300 buildings) with over 16,000 objects

You may wonder how to get to the museum… this is quite simple - the fastest way is by taxi, taken from the center of Sibiu it is quite cheep. Other means of transportation are trolleybuses T1 and T4 that both run to Hanul Dumbrava or buses 17 (to Rasinari) or 15 (to Paltinis). Trams run past the museum from Calea Dumbravii and from Rasinari. The museum has its own minibus, which will ferry you from the Large Square.

One drawback is the fact the the museum is opened only from 1st of May until 15th of October,
Daily: 10 - 18, Except Mondays, but you’ll manage to get inside during winters.