Gocsej Village Museum

The Gocsej is a wooded, hilly corner of Zala in the far west of Hungary where villages were small, scattered and built almost entirely of timber, and in 1968 the first open-air village museum in the country opened on the edge of Zalaegerszeg to preserve them. Around forty buildings were dismantled and re-erected here in a layout following the settlement pattern of the region: log and plank houses with thatched roofs, barns, a bell tower, a smithy, presses and outbuildings, furnished as they were used, arranged in the loose clustered groups the Gocsej actually built rather than in a street. An oil industry museum stands next to it, reflecting the drilling that came to Zala in the 1930s.

What you actually see

• Timber and thatch houses - the building tradition of the Gocsej hills.
• A clustered settlement layout - the scattered pattern the region used.
• Furnished interiors - rooms set out as they were lived in.
• The neighbouring oil museum - the drilling industry that came to Zala.

When to go

April to October; most of the site closes for winter. Two to three hours. Craft demonstration days and festivals run through the summer. Closed Mondays.

Honest expectations

It closes for a large part of the year. Interpretation is mostly in Hungarian. It covers similar ground to other Hungarian open-air museums, so one is often enough. Rain leaves the paths muddy.

Nearby

Zalaegerszeg is south; the Orseg lies west.