Samogitian Museum "Alka", Telsiai County, Lithuania

3acorna 5:00 PM Jul 20, 2018

Museum proper
Actually, Museum Alka has three branches: main museum (inside Telsiai town), open air ethnographic museum (in Telsiai outskirts) and Museum of Varniai Episcopate (in Varniai village). Information on their homepage is a bit muddled in Lithuanian and almost totally lacking in English, so it will be difficult to find out about the individual branches. Here I will review the main and the oldest branch situated in Telsiai, Muziejaus Str. 31. It began as a collection of various artefacts connected to Samogitia, many of them from deteriorated manors. At present it can be roughly divided into several parts: Samogitian history and archaeology, Samogitian manors and folk art, and Samogitian nature. Two first parts are not bad really, the archaeological exhibition is very modern, and the exhibits are interesting. The nature part is just a haphazard collection of stuffed animals with not very good labelling, so can be easily skipped. The manor part is quite OK, with some interactive information, some interesting artefacts, some art, ranging from charming pieces to exceptionally bad ones (obviously, there was enough of bad art in 17-19th centuries, too). There is a heart-wrenching exposition dedicated to the Jewish community of Telsiai, almost entirely lost during WWII. The largest drawback is that all labelling and written information is in Lithuanian. There are some printed pages in English and Russian in every room, but they are quite inconvenient to use. The best way to get information is to have a guided excursion.