Bucovina Village Museum, Northeast Romania, Romania

5Mihai R 5:00 PM Sep 19, 2020

Extremely detailed interiors!
Small and compact village museum. However, in terms of attention to interior house details, it's a 10/10. Interiors are reconstructed to perfection! All the important village interiors are presented: the potter, the blacksmith, the pub, water mill, the oil mill, church, primary school, weaving house, coats workshop, stables, barns along with traditional village homes with all their traditions such as agriculture tools, baptising, wedding, funeral rituals and many more. Unexpectedly amazing!

5Marian C 5:00 PM Sep 11, 2020

A lesson is modern museography
I did not expected it. Who would? Quietly tucked away behind the admission office of the Disney-esque (or kitschy, if you wish) medieval fort Suceava's take on a village museum stands firmly on its own feet. And while stumbling slowly on its stone paved paths I was nowhere near ready for an open lesson in modern museography. And this is what I got! A small collection of dwellings (a couple of gems among them) in pristine condition provided the backdrop for a journey I will never forget. Birth, marriage, burial, genius, were as many excuses for immersive multisenzorial experiences pushing one deeper and deeper into a self-exploring journey. How do you put multi-sensorial magic into words? You don't... So I'll not. Imagine the cold, small, dark, oppressive spaces of the cottages, filled with the smells of countless spices and fabrics, illusive figures, the air vibrating with recorded incantations for good fortune at birth, marriage or torn by the grief at the departure of a dear one. And then walking back from the claustrophobic IN into the transitional space of the porch to the burning light and heat; and reaching for the forever lost balance. There are countless benches and tables scattered in larger groups or discreetly tucked away if exploring your inner self requires more than the brief snap with the mandatory smartphone. There are no demonstration gardens, staff working with medieval gear and the mill is not spinning a will in this museum. It is not a working village in the way one experiences in the West. Suceava's village museum is not about that. The fabric of the museum is a backdrop to subtle contemporary art. A post-structuralist manifesto I dear to add... Take Maria Tanase shrine (Romania's Edith Piaf put simply) and the self-referential approach on the composition of a timeless voice an character. Carefully restored clothing? Jewellery? Scraps of paper behind glass? The voice (more vibrato in one room, slidely deeper in another-is it the limited sound system or an artist's work?) resolves it all. No answers! Just more questions! I had a great time in this museum. I found the art installations reaching up there with the experiences one gets in the Tate Moderns of this world. And the experience I placed atop of 2 weeks of being lost in the magic of Bucovina, with its landscape, obsession for traditions, great food and (endangered)architectural heritage. If you visited the far larger village museums in Bucuresti or near Sibiu you are in for a treat: ancient folk art can be contemporary. It can be smelled, seen, heard by anyone in the here and now. This is not a museum to experience in 1 hour. That is barely enough for the seeing. But then you need to factor the smelling. The hearing. The tasting. And, if you anyway lost the better part of 2 hours, maybe a moment for thinking. Visited in August 2019.