A traditional village in the heart of the modern Romanian capital. By Marin Stoica, Senior Account Manager, GSS Romania
When I was told I was the lucky one selected to share with you a personal experience of our local culture, I was delighted because winter in Bucharest is full of events and the only difficulty for me was to choose the most appropriate one. I could have told you about the unique local traditions, about Romanian Christmas carols, about the season lights on the streets of Bucharest, about the numerous concerts organised during this time of the year or about the joyful spirit of the Old Town, where clubs are full of young or not so young people, all in very good mood, always with their mobile phones keeping them in touch with the entire world.
But this last view of the bustling life in a modern city as Bucharest nowadays, where the internet connection speed is one of the best in the world, made me in fact give up all my initial ideas and compelled me to invite you to come with me to a very special place, certainly quieter: the Village Museum, which was established in 1936 and just celebrated its 80th anniversary.
The name can be misleading as this is not a typical museum, but a place in the open air spread out on an area of 16-hectares, located only a several minutes’ walk from the UniCredit’s Romanian headquarters. It stages dozens of beautiful old houses, some of them hundreds of years old, which have been brought here piece by piece from various folkloric regions of Romania and laid down in the heart of Bucharest.
You enter through the gate, which can be seen from the busy Kiseleff Avenue, and step into a completely different yet friendly world. You then start to understand that each one of these small rustic houses was once a household, established by hard-working people to raise their children. Walking by all these households, you discover a water mill, several small churches, hay houses, barns, woven fences, boats, carts, oil mills and grinding mills.
All these exhibits create an ambiance so friendly that you instantly wish to find out more about the people that lived in the houses you just visited and about the villages where they were once built and inhabited. I do not thus need any other reason to decide that next year I have to visit many of the places the houses of the Village Museum originally came from. And I will not use the lack of time as an excuse because this museum reminded me that “eternity was born in the village”.
Marin Stoica
Senior Account Manager
GSS Romania
marin.stoica@unicredit.ro