Located in the heart of Romania, in the city of Sibiu, the National Museum Complex ASTRA is one of the leading ethnographic museums in Romania and, above all, it is a space of impressions. This will not be an ordinary visit to a museum, where you will simply be presented with a synthesis of the Romanian countryside. This trip will be a real opportunity to enter the world, the end of which someone already considers a thing that happened a long time ago. The open-air museum is located on 132 hectares, it has more than 400 exhibits. Mirela Yancu, director of cultural marketing at the museum, tells us more about it: "It is not only about mills and other technical installations, but also about whole households that reproduce the way of life and work that we are still lucky enough to meet in some villages in Romania. Guided tours can usually be scheduled, contact details for this can be found on our website or directly on the Muzeul Astra Facebook page. Our route can be completed on foot or in a horse-drawn cart. In winter, they drove a sleigh together. There are two traditional restaurants on the territory of the museum, where a menu that matches the theme of the museum awaits you.” The Astra Museum was subsequently reinvented and modernized so that tourists always have an unforgettable impression. International cooperation is becoming more frequent and diverse: "We have a strategic partnership with Norway. We have successfully completed two major projects that have significantly expanded our outdoor museum. This is the Astra Cultural Heritage Center, the territory of the laboratories and heritage storekeepers. Then, it is the museum's multicultural pavilion, the gateway to the open-air museum. This is a new building that houses the most modern means of receiving visitors, as well as permanent expositions of the Museum of Transylvanian Civilization, temporary exhibitions, conference halls, halls of museum education and galleries of folk art - a space where all the country's craftsmen can present their products." The museum review book is always open on the table in the main lobby. Many reviews and thanks on Trip Advisor or on the Facebook page of the Astra Museum in Sibiu. Tourists are fascinated by this museum with a rich history: "The open-air museum was founded in the 1960s on the basis of research that had begun decades before. It was founded by the ethnographer and museum specialist Kornel Irimiye, the most famous student of Dimitrie Gusti. It was created as a folk art museum, with the aim of demonstrating the ingenuity of the people living in the countryside and preserving Romania's pre-industrial cultural heritage. In the 1950s, more than 5,000 technical structures were discovered and described by scientific expeditions on the territory of Romania. From them, the national commission, which included ethnographers, selected a wide variety of devices that demonstrate the technical ingenuity of folk craftsmen: a mill, a tool for sawmills, felting machines... They were transferred to the museum starting in 1961." Harvest Festival, Research Night, Museum Marketing and Education, Culture and Local Gastronomy, Wool History, Folk Band Festival are some of the events you can take part in at Astra Museum. And you can always visit the museum's temporary or permanent exhibitions. The price of the entrance ticket is 25 lei (5 euros) for adults. Entrance for children under six is free, a tour with a guide in a foreign language costs 250 lei (50 euros) per hour.
