Outdoor museums form an integral part of the cultural and ethnographic heritage in the Czech lands. They are conceived as rescue devices for traditional folk buildings that cannot be saved in their original place. The aim of these museums is to transfer selected buildings to an artificial environment, a kind of newly created village, while preserving the highest degree of authenticity of the buildings, including their interior fittings. Large and smaller farms, technical buildings (for example, a mill or sawmill) and small religious buildings (village chapels), barns, storehouses, granaries, sheds, dryers for fruit and herbs, barns and beehives are thus suitably integrated into the natural area.
Ethnographic Museums collect valuable documents on the way of life of the village population, on the way of subsistence and economy, especially what concerns agriculture and village handicraft production. Village craft workshops, forges, agricultural implements, household implements.
Ethnographic museums play an important role in maintaining living traditions and in presenting folk culture. Throughout the year, museums can see and experience various customs and traditions experienced by our ancestors from spring to winter.
Several times a year, is possible participate in baking loaves of bread or festive pastries, Colaches, filled with cottage cheese, fruits or poppy seeds.
Before Easter, adults and children can weave a twig from fresh willow branches, which they then use to carole from door to door beautifully colored eggs, symbols of the unbroken cycle of life, from women and girls on Easter Monday.
Before Christmas, traditional Christmas pastries are baked and decorations for the Christmas tree are made. The production of blown glass ornaments produced in České sklarny was even registered as an intangible cultural heritage within the framework of UNESCO.
In the open-air museum, you can find out what crops our ancestors grew, how they processed them, preserved them for the rest of the year, and what kind of food they cooked from them. Visitors to the museum can be amazed at what our ancestors had to do in order to survive, to support the whole family, which was traditionally very large, when 10 children per couple was nothing unusual.
The cultivation of flax and hemp and their processing also required certain knowledge, and the whole family was often involved. Crops had to be grown, harvested, processed into yarn, and adult members of the family and older children were usually engaged in the actual weaving of fabrics in the winter, when there was no work in the fields. The woven fabric was often dyed with only one color. The technique of dyeing with blue paint, the so-called blue print, has been preserved to this day, which is also included in the list of intangible cultural heritage on the UNESCO list.
A visit to such a unique museum of folk buildings and traditions during a day tour from Prague will become one of the unforgettable experiences when discovering the Czech Republic, the land of your ancestors.
