RURAL TOURISME IN ROMANIA in MUNTENIA County

  Dorin and Maria PARASCHIV Guest House Starchiojd

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Newsletter :

Agrement of Romania Tourism Ministery n° 5206 / 11.12.2001

The Village Museum
Click on pictures to enlarge it !
	When we talk about the Village Museum we can not ignore the context of what the international sociology called "The Sociological School from Bucharest" founded and led by professor Dimitrie Gusti. It was a new inter-disciplinary experiment, well commented upon even today in Europe and the U.S.A., interested mainly in the rural community.
"The Sociological School from Bucharest" supported Gusti's principles, within which the research activity was based on a permanent connection between "knowledge" and "action". From this perspective, the Village Museum in Bucharest is one of the "action" results, built upon the explicitly asserted desire to globally demonstrate the sociological structure of the Romanian village.
	It is obvious that the research activity was more ample than the one summarised in the previous chapter. The objects that had been disassembled and transported to Bucharest in 1936 are a proof in this respect. They illustrate elements of the traditional life that are specific to other villages as well. It is a testimony for the Sociological School and its coryphaeus's attention to cover the entire land that represented Romania at that time.
	Unfortunately, we don't have enough records that could show us the entire road that was walked until the concrete organising of the museum. We know few context elements. It was in 1932 that the ample activity of hydro-amelioration for the regulation of the Colentina and Mostistea Rivers began. It was meant to create the chain of lakes from the northeastern part of the Capital-city, including the Herastrau Park. These works will reach to an end in 1937.
From the point of view of the planimetric setting, the dwelling proper is, generally, composed of three rooms: 1. Narrow room disposed on the width of the construction ("tinda"), placed on a median position, allowing access inside the house and destined to activities concerning the processing of the textile fibres (from animal or vegetal source) necessary to weaving; 2. The guest room, often named "the parade house" or "the cold room" because it lacks any heating system; it always gives to the street and has the most beautiful objects a family has (furniture, ceramics, textile pieces), disposed in such a manner that their display determine favourable remarks on the family's diligence; the girl's dowry will be selected from these objects and together with other goods (cattle, sheep, poultry, land, etc.) will accompany her when she will get married; 3. The family's room ("by the fire") where the entire family lives.
	The access inside the two rooms is, most often, made through the "tinda." This median room is rarely missing from a rural house the access being thus made directly from outside. If there were no administrative orders imposed to the rural communities the peasant would build his house facing the south, so that it should receive light during the entire day and be protect from the dominant winds and precipitations, which, in Romania, come from the northern and eastern sides of the country.
At the present moment the exhibition has 76 distinct complexes, with a total of 322 constructions (47 dwellings, household dependencies, 3 wooden churches, 3 windmills, technical installations that use the force of the water etc.) The Village Museum had a troubled history. The Elisabeth Palace began to be built in 1937 and in order to clear the place for this site, some buildings brought from Caliacra, Basarabia, an installation for preparing and preserving the fish from the Danube Delta and circa 6 wind mills from Dobrudja. Nobody re-assembled them; then the change of the country's borders imposed a reducing of the exhibition area. Finally, the museum lost from its name even the adjective "Romanian" because the cultural authorities of that time considered that this word might exclude the policy of good interethnic co-habitation that was promoted by the communist state, a fact that had been there for hundreds of years in the, anyway, Romanian village.

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