The Village Museum in the first communist decades and the transformations of the Gusti legacy
The article examines the postwar transformations of one particular legacy of the Bucharest School of Sociology, the Village Museum, now the Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum. It argues that in new political context of the late 1940s and 1950s, the open-air museum radically changed its mission and approach to the collection and display of folk architecture
and artifacts. The article also explores the relationship between the museum and two central policies of the socialist state: the collectivization of rural property and the construction of vast modern housing districts for the urban population.
Keywords: open-air museum, folk architecture, collectivization, modernization, model village.
1. Letter, Dimitrie Gusti to King Carol II, April 20, 1936. Published in Stoica, Muzeul Satului Bucureşti, 9.
2. Several exhibitions of artifacts collected during the monographic campaigns predate the open-air exhibition of 1936. Conceived and organized by Mac Constantinescu as fully-developed museological events, they deserve their own, separate, discussion. See Stahl’s remarks in Rostas, Monografia ca utopie, 276-77.
3. More than 300,000 people visited the Village Museum in 2010 – the country’s topmost attraction for tourists and locals alike. The imposing and respectable National Museum of Art came in a distant second, with 80,000 annual visitors. Numbers published in www.Adevărul.ro, accessed on January 27, 2011. http://www.adevarul.ro/locale/bucuresti/TOP_Peste_300-
4. Hotararea Guvernului Romaniei nr. 742/2003, art. 18 lit. d, in MONITORUL OFICIAL AL ROMANIEI, Anul 171 (XV) – Nr. 493, 8 iulie 2003
5. See Stahl’s description in Rostas, Monografia ca utopie, 159-160.
6. Focşa, Muzeul Satului, 4. These numbers await confirmation from the museum’s archives.
7. See Cezar Lăzărescu, Urbanismul în România (Bucharest: Editura Tehnică, 1977) and Grigore Ionescu, Arhitectura în România în perioada anilor 1944-1969 (Bucharest: Editura
Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1969).
8. http://www.muzeul-satului.ro/moldova_72_zapodeni.php
9. Focşa, Muzeul Satului, 7.
10. See, for instance, Raluca Muşat, Sociologists and the transformation of the peasantry in Romania, 1925-1940. PhD thesis, London, 2011, as well as the groundbreaking work produced by the graduate students under Zoltan Rostaş in Bucharest.
11. According to Gusti, the student teams were doing “work of social pedagogy in the villages, work to educate and influence the mentality and the soul of the villager.” In return, the young urban dwellers would establish lasting bonds between town and
country. Finally, Gusti saw these campaigns as ways to alert and educate the government authorities to the ways and needs of the village. Dimitrie Gusti, “Învăţăminte şi perspective din a III-a campanie de lucru a echipelor studenţeşti” in A III-a expoziţie a echipelor regale studenţeşti. Catalog (Fundaţia culturală regală “Principele Carol”, 1937), 8.
12. Gheorghe Focşa, Satul model Dioşti (Bucharest: “Şcoala poporului,” 1941), 5.
13. Ibid, 8.
14. So important was this aspect of the museum’s role that arrangements were proposed in 1938 to discharge the women of the need for cooking, and to allow them more time for their weaving, embroidering, etc.
15. In 1938, the museum’s administrator complains about the many letters he receives from villagers asking for restitution of objects they had lent the museum. See the October 24, 1936 report on the state of the museum re-transcribed in Gheorghe Focşa, “Etape successive in elaborarea tematicii Muzeului Satului, Anuar Muzeul Satului (1970): 7
16. In preparation of the first exhibition in 1936, Gusti devised detailed criteria for the selection of buildings and villagers to be brought to Bucharest for display. While in keeping with to the way other open-air museums of the time used attendants in historical clothes to re-enacted customs and crafts (see Bokrijk in Belgium for instance), they deserve to be fully listed: Any house selected for the exhibition should be rural, that is, without having been subjected to the influence of urban trends. The houses should bear the characteristics of the region. The houses should be “beautiful,” “perfect models of beauty.” Gusti’s instructions warned against exhibiting houses that were either too modest (that connoted poverty and misery) or too opulent. It is important to note how the original exhibition openly avoided any representation of socio-economic class. The houses need not be old. The museum was not concerned with age value, and Gusti instructs to look for houses “as they are today.” Each house was expected to be occupied for the two summer
months of the exhibition by a couple of married villagers. The imported villagers were to receive a salary in addition to being allowed to sell the visitors the products of their craft. The villagers were expected to be “handsome, healthy, and inclined to talk.” They were to be dressed in beautiful costume, and they had to be altogether “absolutely authentic.” Archival fund “Fundaţia culturală – centrală”, file 7/1936. Also published in Silvia Păduraru, “Noi documente cu privire la viziunea expoziţională a Şcolii Sociologice de la Bucureşti în perioada interbelică,” Anuar Muzeul Satului: 417-421.
17. ANIC (Arhivele Naţionale Istorice Centrale), Ministerul Artelor 144/1950, p. 74.
18. Archival fund “Fundaţia culturală – centrală”, file 7/1936. Also published in Silvia Păduraru, “Noi documente cu privire la viziunea expoziţională a Şcolii Sociologice de la Bucureşti în perioada interbelică,” 418.
19. Focşa, Muzeul Satului, 4
20. Focşa’s insistent and ultimately successful petitioning of various branches of the government to remove the inhabitants after 1948 is well documented in ANIC, Ministerul Artelor 144/1950. It is true that the removal of the Bessarabian refugees had a larger political dimension, but the removal is entirely coherent with the museum’s new scientific identity.
21. Arhiva INMI (Institutul Naţional al Monumentelor Istorice), Fond Direcţia Monumentelor Istorice, Dosar 7534 – Biserica Răpciuni. Letter, dated April 20, 1958, to the President of the Romanian Academy, Commission of the Historical Monuments, Bucharest.
22. In my estimate, the museum acquires between one and three multi-structure rural households per year between 1949 and 1962, when collectivization was deemed complete. Only within three years (1957-1959) the museum acquires 33 structures. (Focşa, Muzeul Satului). The rhythm of the acquisitions continues well into the 1960s. This information comes from secondary sources and correspondence between the VM and various ministries, which can be found at the ANIC.
23. Katherine Verdery, “Chiaburii vechi si noi: închiaburirea si deschiaburirea ţăranilor din Aurel Vlaicu,” in D. Dobrincu and C. Iordachi, Ţărănimea şi Puterea: Procesul de colectivizare a agriculturii în România, 1949-1962 (Iasi: Polirom, 2005).
24. ANIC, Ministerul Artelor 144/1950, pages 20, 21.
25. C. Iordachi, “Case Study: Collectivization in the Village of Jurilovca,” in Constantin Iordachi, Dorin Dobrincu, eds. Transforming Peasants, Property and Power. The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1948-1962 (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 2009), 119 onwards.
26. Dobrogea had been an early test case of socialist reconfiguration of a regional unit. After the rapid and largely effective collectivization of the rural land, the communist regime turned its attention to the transformation of the Black Sea Coast. Holiday resorts such as Eforie and Mamaia were at the forefront of the communist regime’s embrace of modernist architecture and territorial planning, and their construction came on the heels of the reform of the rural hinterland.
27. H. H. Stahl speaks at length about the close (and at times tense) relationship between “pure science” and cultural action. Rostas, Monografia ca utopie, p. 95 onwards.
28. “Cînd intri într-o sală de expoziţie a acestui centru [of which the VM was to be a part] trebuie să vezi care sunt marele probleme ale ţării. Există probleme demografice? Şi care sunt aceste probleme demografice? ţinute la zi… rînd pe rînd, toate problemele de natură sociologică ale realităţii.” Interview with Stahl in Rostas, Monografia ca utopie, p.160.
29. Focşa, Muzeul Satului, 74.
