The President is shocked by the poor storage of the collections of the Open Air Museum

The Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia occupies 87 hectares of wide territory on the shores of Lake Jugla. The exhibits on display here tell about the life of farmers in the Latvian countryside from the 17th century. the end to the middle of the 20th century. This year, the museum marks its 100th anniversary.

In honor of this event, the president of the country also visited the museum this week, who later admitted that he was unpleasantly surprised by the conditions in which the museum’s exhibits were forced to be stored.

“There, to tell the truth, the basis of the national identity of the people, those stocks are in a simply insane situation. There has been no investment there for decades. And if something happens at one point, we will grab our heads again and whine about where we were for 30 years, when we did not allocate funds to protect the various types of 18th, 19th, early 20th century collections,” President Edgars Rinkevičs was outraged .

The public expositions of the museum are taken care of, but a very sad scene unfolds in the territory, which is hidden from the eyes of visitors on a daily basis. The farm part of the museum basically consists of garages, warehouses and sheds built in the 1960s.

Restorers work in a sawmill with no heating, carpenters in the living room of a house built in Soviet times. None of the buildings where the centuries-old objects are stored have been built for museum purposes.

The museum is only partially able to fulfill the legal requirements – how the exhibits should be stored, and in fact only thanks to the enthusiasm of the employees. At the moment, the situation is so critical that 20 buildings, which theoretically should allow visitors to enter, are closed because they store items that have no place elsewhere.

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