Romanian Peasant Museum marks 25th anniversary

The Romanian Peasant Museum has commemorated a quarter of a century of operations with a series of free guided tours of its permanent collections and a traditional fair where popular artists came to sell their products, from traditional clothing to traditional homemade goods. The anniversary events complement the museum’s program of weekly themed traditional fairs and cultural events, plus its cinema, bookstore and restaurant.

The museum has a checkered history. In 1990, then minister of culture Andrei Plesu nominated painter Horia Bernea to become the director of the institution in order to re-establish the collections removed during the communist era. Six years later, the museum was blooming, winning the prestigious EMYA award for European museum of the year, the only one in Romania to have earned this distinction.

The facility is in Bucharest’s Victoriei Square, next to the Grigore Antipa Natural Science Museum and the Geology Museum. The construction of the building, including its design, was the work of Nicolae Ghika-Budesti, one of the most feted architects of the time.

Construction took over 29 years and the building opened in 1941. It is representative of the neo-Romanian style, inspired by traditional architecture, especially Brancovenesc, with a composition using mainly floral and zoomorphic decorations. Features include the visible red bricklayer, the big windows under arches, the columns of the logia and the elegant silhouette of the main tower recalling bell towers in old monasteries.

The initial plan was for a National Art Museum with art historian Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcas being a director for over 40 years. When Romania was occupied by Soviet forces, in the so-called “liberation” of 1944, the museum was also “liberated” from its home and replaced with the Lenin-Stalin Museum. The National Art Museum moved, as a tenant, to Stirbei Palace on Calea Victoriei for 25 years and under a new name: the Popular Art Museum of the Romanian Popular/Socialist Republic. During this period, museographers were forced to stash away some valuable collection pieces, especially religious ones, for ideological reasons. However, they managed to increase the stock of peasant art threefold.

Over years, the building has been used as the Lenin-Stalin Museum, as well as Lenin Museum, Romanian Communist Party Museum and the History Museum of the

Romanian Communist Party and of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement.