After 9 (long) years, the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant reopens its doors to the general public. All tourists are welcome to visit the museum from Wednesday to Sunday, between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., starting April 25, 2025.
After a lengthy consolidation period that started in 2016 and a long time needed for refurbishment, the museum curators are suspending the elapsed time and reopening the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant doors after Easter, on April 25, 2025. This gesture takes us back to our recent history: the moment in 1993, when the museum was inaugurated on the very second day of Easter.
The objects were returned to their places (which they had left for a few years). The museum’s visitors will find them where you left them, along with new stories about the museum, the village, the town, the peasant and the child. In the spirit of the museography initiated by Horia Bernea and his team in 1990, the museum invites visitors to discover the face of a complex peasant, as it can be deciphered from the objects on display, part of a museum heritage of over 155,000 pieces.
The museum has a tumultuous century-long history of ups and downs. It continues museum traditions that date back to 1875, when, at the suggestion of the literary critic Titu Maiorescu, the first textile art section was set up alongside the National Museum of Antiquities, with works made in the village, from which the collections of our museum still preserve several pieces today: messages over time with documentary and emotional value.
On July 13, 1906, an autonomous museum dedicated to peasant art was established: the Museum of Ethnography, National Art, Decorative Art and Industrial Art, housed in the former State Mint building. The director of this institution, art historian Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș, was to give the museum a prestigious scientific and cultural status. On June 17, 1912, the foundation stone was laid for the building to house the National Art Museum, directed for 40 years by Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș. As director, he succeeded in continuously developing the museum and Romanian ethnographic museography, keeping it at the forefront of the European ideas movement.
In 1953, the museum was banished from its home and moved to the Știrbei Palace building on Calea Victoriei, as the Museum of Popular Art. After the earthquake in 1977, it also left this building, which was administratively merged with the Village Museum.
It was only in 1990 that the Minister of Culture, Andrei Pleșu, decided to return the collections to the building on Kiseleff and (re)establish the museum under the name of the Romanian Peasant Museum. Horia Bernea (the new director, a connoisseur of the village) and his team of specialists healed the wounds of the museum’s long wandering, transforming it into a vanguard institution of Romanian museography. Thanks to their contribution, in 1996 the museum was awarded the prestigious EMYA prize (European Museum of the Year), the only museum institution in Romania to receive this recognition.
Since December 2000, the museum has been under the direction of valuable people of culture: acad. Dinu C. Giurescu (2000-2005), anthropologist Vintilă Mihăilescu (2005-2010), historian Virgil Ștefan Nițulescu (2010-2016; 2019-present) and artist Lila Passima (2016-2019).
On the 35th anniversary of the Museum on the Road’s return home, in Kiseleff no. 3, we open the ground floor of the museum with the exhibition “Christian Law.” Here, each room speaks of the ritual of faith and the beauty of peasant art. With the reopening of the doors, we also make room for debates about what our museum still is or can be, about its meanings today.
