The Museum of Folk Architecture and Life (the Museum, for short), which is situated in Pirogovo Village, Kiev, is one of the most famous open-air museums of ethnography.
The Museum occupies an area of 150 hectares (370 acres), which accommodates around 300 objects. A standard, 3-hour tour will not be enough to go around the entire museum. Apart from the large area, the Museum differs from other Ukraine's museums of this kind in that its exhibitions are dedicated to the entire country and not to a single region.
Theatrical performances are another vivid distinctive feature of the Museum. Other museums focus on exhibitions of material culture, and only now they are starting to adopt the Museum's experience in introducing visitors to ancient folk customs. At the estates and in the fields, folk songs may be heard; and often one may see such craftsmen as embroiderers, weavers, carvers, smiths, potters, glass-blowers and master braiders at work. At the Museum, visitors may always buy vyshyvanka (Ukrainian traditional clothing containing ethnic embroidery), rushnik (Ukrainian embroidered decorative towel), ceramic dishes and toys, wooden caskets, dishes and items of adornment.
Throughout the year, the Museum organises folk and religious celebrations, Christian as well as heathen ones. The Museum possesses five functioning ancient churches, which organise services, marriages and baptisms.
The rituals are reconstructed by employees of the Museum. They study customs of various Ukraine's regions and write scripts, invite folk bands, schoolchildren and university students that play in theatrical performances. Everybody may participate in these performances, as a background actor. Visitors take lessons in Ukrainian folk crafts, foreigners take pleasure in painting Easter eggs, eminent politicians enthusiastically work at potter's wheels and young Ukrainian girls master the art of embroidery.
Almost all the objects of the Museum are authentic works of folk wooden architecture brought from various Ukraine's regions. A picturesque hill with real windmills became a symbol of Ukraine as "the granary of the world". The exhibits of the Museum introduce visitors to Ukrainian peasants' everyday life and folk art: the Museum has amassed a huge collection of folk clothes, furniture, wooden and clay dishes and musical instrument.
Created in 1969, the Museum was conceived by Pyotr Tronko, a Hero of Ukraine. At that time, many villages were flooded to create the artificial Kiev Sea; this included a part of the ancient Kazarovichi Village that contained houses constructed 200–300 years before. At the initiative of the community, the government of Ukraine (then part of the USSR) founded the Museum. When the Museum was opened to the public in 1976, the employees of the Museum had, in a very short period of time, done expeditionary and search work to create architectural and everyday-life holdings.
Situated on the far outskirts of Kiev, the Museum did not at first raise a particular interest. Initially, only schoolchildren were brought there as part of curriculum. But after the compulsory trips many wanted to visit the Museum again and again, because, though being a state cultural institution, the Museum better resembled a park and, at the same time, a materialised illustration to a Ukrainian folk tale.
Estates with village houses and utility buildings were grouped with extreme authenticity and in accordance with regional differences in settlement planning. The Museum presents six ethnographic regions: the Middle Dnieper Valley, the Poltava-Sloboda region, the Polesia region, the Podolia region, the South and the Carpathians. There are also the following exhibitions: Windmills, The Fairground and The Modern Village.
For the most part, the Museum reconstruct the 18th – early 20th century rural Ukraine. However, The Modern Village introduces visitors to the 1960s–1970s rural architecture and to thoroughly reconstructed interiors. Employees of the Museum filled each house with exhibits and decorated it with products of factories from the region that the house represents. One may call them precise copies. The ancient huts are however original. They were carefully disassembled in various parts of Ukraine, marked, brought to Pirogovo and rebuilt here. A hut from 1587, a small dwelling containing an oven without a chimney, is the most ancient exhibit. Also among special exhibits is a hut that used to belong to relatives of Taras Shevchenko.
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