The Wallachian Open Air Museum

Founded in 1925, this is the largest open air museum in the country and the second oldest, and still one of the best kept. It has three parts on a wooded slope above the town. The Wooden Town gathers the buildings of a small square, including a timber church and an old inn. The Wallachian Village puts farmsteads, fields and grazing animals on the hillside as they would have stood, with smoke coming out of the roofs when the stoves are lit. Mill Valley runs water through a race to drive a working mill, a sawmill, a forge and an oil press. Staff in costume work the crafts rather than posing for photographs.

History

The museum was founded by the Jaroněk brothers, from a family of craftsmen: Bohumír Jaroněk, a painter and graphic artist, took a particular interest in Wallachian timber cottages and saw an open-air display of Wallachian buildings at the Ethnographic Czech-Slavic Exhibition in Prague in 1895, and after the brothers settled in Rožnov in 1909 Alois Jaroněk visited Skansen in Stockholm, the first open-air museum in the world. They worked on the idea from 1911, and the museum opened in 1925 during a folklore festival called the "Wallachian year", with two large houses, the town hall and an 18th-century townhouse, and several smaller buildings. A group of carpenters under Michal Fabián later built a wooden church to the plans of the church at Větřkovice near Příbor, which had burned in 1878, and the original part became known as the Little Wooden Town. The Wallachian Village, with some 40 buildings, was built up in the 1960s, and the Watermill Valley, with mills and workshops showing village crafts, opened in the 1980s; it is the largest open-air museum in the country (Wikipedia, Wallachian Open Air Museum).

What's there

• The wooden church - shingled timber built without a nail showing, at the centre of the Wooden Town.
• Mill Valley - a millrace turning a working mill, sawmill and forge.
• The hillside farmsteads - houses, fields and animals laid out as a Wallachian village.
• Craft demonstrations - baking, weaving, smithing and shingle splitting on working days.

When to go

May to September is when all three sites are open and the mills run; summer weekends bring folklore programmes with music and dancing, which is the liveliest time and the most crowded. In winter only part of the museum opens and the village and valley usually close. Interiors are sometimes shown by guided entry only, on a fixed rotation.

Good to know

The three sites are spread out and the ground is steep, so a full visit means several kilometres of walking and a combined ticket that is not cheap. Interiors are often viewable only through a doorway or with a guide. When a festival is on, the paths jam. English labelling is thin and the guided talks are usually in Czech.

Nearby

The Beskydy hills and the Radhost ridge rise directly behind the town.

Key facts