Situated in the picturesque environment of the Herastrau lake, the Village Museum is one of the main points of attraction of Bucharest.

Organized as a temporary exhibition, in 1936, and then as a permanent ethnographic museum, in 1948, it includes at present 65 ensembles with 298 monuments of folk architecture and other objects exhibited in the open air, endowed with 21.500 original objects.

Identified as a result of extensive ethnographic research work made all over the country, selected according to their historical, economic, technical, social and artistic value, these ensembles form a vast synthesis of the authentic popular constructions.

The permanent exhibition of the museum, set out on a 10 hectars ground, includes dwelling houses and annex constructions (stables, barns and storehouses, summer kitchens and granaries, stalls and hen coops), gates with archways, wells, crosses and wooden and stone roadside crucifixes, old wooden churches with pointed cupolas, artisan's workshops and installations with popular industrial mechanisms, thus illustrating the achievements of the Romanian people in the fields of popular architecture and decorative art, as well as its technical-artisan's ingenuity. This Museum enables people to find about the rural population's way of life and constitutes at the same time an opportunity of aesthetic delight.

The museum is systematically arranged, on scientific bases, made of local and zone ensembles.Transported from the characteristic ethnographic zones of the country and rebuilt in the which are completing reciprocally in a comprehensive picture of a many-sided type, the museum points out the complex aspects of life, technique, ocial life and folk art, being at the same time and at the same extent, a museum of the peasants' technique and architecture, historical-social museum, a museum of the furniture, of the textiles, of the costume, of the pottery and all the household objects.

Transported and rebuilt in the museum, by local seasant masters, these buildings have been grouped in the park, among decorative trees, fruit-trees lawns and gardens full of flowers, according to the territorial-geographical criteria in district provincial sectors.

These original ensembles, point out the main occupations of the Romanian people and its living conditions during a long period (the XVIIth - the XXth centuries). They differ from the point of view of style, structure and inventories, depending on the nature of the geographical surroundings - mountain hill, hillocks, plain and marsh, according to the stage of historical evolution.

The museum shows at the same time the differences in the material and social state of the peasantry in the past, its units being valuable historical documents. Its precious monuments and objects are a proof of the Romanian people's contribution to the patrimony of the universal culture.

They offer inexhaustible sources of research and inspiration for the present creations.

The Village Museum - one of the most frequented touritic places in Bucharest - is an efficient means to become acquainted with the Romanian creation a bridge, widely open to friendship among peoples.

Developing a large scientific research activity, aiming at the systematic increase of its patrimony, organizing various educational and cultural manifestations, the Village Museum became, during the recent years, not only an institution frequently visited by large masses of visitors from this country and from abroad, which surpass a quarter of a million yearly, but also a centre of museum information of international interest to which more and more foreign specialists resort., asking for data and concrete explanations concerning the conception, the content and the museum technique used for its arrangement, in order to establish similar Museums in various countries of the world.

Thus the Village Museum directly contributes to the present development of this new type of open-air ethnographic museum, a synthesis destined to register in its permanent deposits and exhibitions, the essential aspects of the various millenary peasants' cultures, subjected, in the present society, to a rapid process of elimination by the extensive and rapid development of the modern technique.