Greetings!
Instead of going to Corvin Castle today, Pat complained enough to get the day targeted on the Astra Museum of Traditional Folk Civilizations. It covers a square mile of Dumbrava Forest, and is the largest open-air museum in Romania, and one of the largest in Central and Eastern Europe. There are over 300 houses, two large lakes and 10 miles of walkways.
Beginning in 1905, efforts to create what was then dubbed "a shelter for keeping the past" began. First titled the Ethnographic Museum, which morphed in the 1960's into an open-air museum with high folk technology as its theme, then became part of the Brukenthal Museum Complex, and finally it inclluded elements of housing and community buildings.
There are really old wooden structures which house functions you can definitely imagine were necessary, but you probably have never seen before. We saw mills of every size on the many creeks, presses for every commodity and aimed at creating all the important products, and entertainment apparatus such as ferris wheels, bowling alleys, dance pavillions, and theaters.
We found a horse-drawn mill, with a horse nearby, a gaggle of ducks, plenty of wagons and boats and paddle wheels. Houses to live in, work in, and store feed and wine in. These folks seem to have developed the ability to shape and use wood for everything they needed. And their metal-working skills brought advanced structural strength to everything.
And one of the best ingredients of the site is that it incorporates musical events into the daily offerings. A festival called "Guitar Meeting" was happening this weekend, and hundreds of the visitors were carrying guitars, destined for jams or formal concerts. The venue's many pockets of trees and hillsides create echo chambers for excellent sound acoustics. And the big lake's central stage carries the big band sounds throughout the entire space. This is a really top-notch day trip.
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