The villages of Romania are still living places, not stage sets: in Maramureș people still build in wood, carved gates mark the houses and folk dress is still worn on Sundays; in Bukovina eggs are decorated and rugs are woven; in the Saxon villages of Transylvania, the row of gable-fronted houses and the fortified church in the middle have stayed almost unchanged for centuries; in the Apuseni, the hamlets of the Moți spread along the ridges. The crafts, the pottery of Horezu and Corund, woodwork, weaving, are still practised and sold at fairs. Villages are best understood by sleeping a night there, not from a stop at the roadside.
The Merry Cemetery at Săpânța, with its painted crosses and witty verses, is the best-known place in the villages of Maramureș. In Sibiu, the ASTRA Museum gathers hundreds of homesteads, mills and churches moved from all over the country and is the best place for an overview. For the Saxon villages, see Transylvania; for the mountain ones, Bukovina.
Top 20The cemetery in Săpânța with over 800 oak crosses painted blue, showing naive scenes from the lives of those buried there and witty epitaphs in verse; begun in 1935 by the craftsman Stan Ioan Pătraș.
Top 20Romania's largest open-air museum, in the Dumbrava forest outside Sibiu: over 300 houses, mills, workshops and wooden churches brought from across the country, along ~10 km of paths.
An open-air ethnographic museum on ~17 hectares at the edge of the Green Forest: houses and outbuildings from Banat villages, a wooden church, a school and an “Alley of Ethnicities”, all gathered into one village.
An open-air ethnographic museum on the shore of Lake Herăstrău, in the middle of Bucharest: farmsteads, wooden churches, mills and workshops brought from all over the country and rebuilt here since 1936.
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