Situated close to the Seat Fortress of Suceava, the Bucovina Village Museum highlights the popular-style architectonic patrimony present in the upper region of the country.
The youngest outdoor museum in Romania, it was set up during the eighth decade of the last century, when the regional villages in Bucovina had countless popular architecture monuments at their disposal, and it took a clearer form after the 1990s when new households and popular installations were transferred, reconstructed and opened to the public.
The overall museum image reflects the complex organisation and activity of a rural settlement, designed as a synthetic model of a village from Bucovina.
All occupations and trades are represented by specific workshops such as: the “Marginea House ” pottery workshop or the “ Vicov House” spoon craftsmanship workshop. The novelty of this museum is given by the representation of the peasant’s spiritual life, marked by passing rituals.
Various items used for the ritual of baby christening are exhibited in the Straja House while, in the Cacica House, you can find items used for the funeral ritual – birth and death, the two main thresholds of life.
Besides its essential functions of preserving, restoring and valorising the local cultural and ethnographic patrimony, the Bucovina Village Museum has also become famous all over the country, for organising folklore shows and festivals (usually on outdoor stages), for holding traditional craftsmanship fairs meant to promote authentic traditions and works, for setting up creation camps for students, thus becoming a main pole in Suceava’s cultural life.