For the last few months,  I’ve started spending most of my weekends in Sibiu and discover step by step its beauties. Situated right in the middle of Romania, Sibiu is a city of about 150 000 inhabitants, European Cultural Capital in 2007 and now, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful and well preserved cities in the country.

Last weekend I finally managed to visit The Village Museum in Sibiu. Located in the ‘Dumbrava Sibiului’ National Rezervation, the Village Museum is one of the biggest in Europe, with over 300 buildings and 16 000 traditional objects. Very easy to get to (by bus from Sibiu you get there in about 20 minutes), it’s a great place to spend a day in the middle of the nature and surrounded by Romanian traditions (and all this for only 4 EUR entry fee).

I didn’t have the time to visit all the houses in the museum (you probably need to book a whole day to get the chance to see each building), but from what I saw, I must admit that I was very impressed. The houses brought from all over the country are very well preserved from the outside and in the inside, the furniture and the tools manage to give you an insight of how life was in the country side some hundred years ago.You can find from living houses, to mills, fisheries, wooden ferries, tools for food production and animal husbandry.

What I really liked is that in some of the houses there are people who take care of those houses. They plant vegetables, they clean the houses, make sure that they are not destroyed. Sometimes they invite you in and stay with you for a quick chat, some of them speak French and German or even English. You can ask them questions about the house, the area of the country where it comes from, the usage of the tools inside it. Some of them just forget to let you go and tell you all sort of stories about living in the country side.

It’s like for a day you go back 100 years in time and learn to enjoy the simple things in life and accept the beauties of the nature just as they are.

Here is a slideshow with some photos I made this weekend :