In more than 30 objects of the museum, people will be busy in clothes corresponding to the era and will do works specific to the specific place and time. The roles of these people will be played by participants from Latvian amateur theaters and folklore ensembles, who will also involve visitors in the farm’s events. The time of the event will be from 11.00 to 16.00.
This impressive performance will open the museum’s summer season.
A trip to the 200-year-old past, or “One day in our home” at the Open Air Museum
100 years ago, in a far from easy economic and political situation for Latvia, the Board of Monuments made a decision on the creation of the Museum of Free Nature. The author of the initiative was the architect Pauls Kundziņš, who was also the first manager of the museum.
Currently, our Open Air Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums of its field in Europe. It is like a kind of essence of our identity – according to the director of the museum, Zanda Ķergalve: “Latvia’s ethnographic open-air museum is Latvia in such a concentrated whole. And it is there that we learn how our national self-consciousness was formed, it is there that we can understand why we are the way we are. and not differently, because Latgale farms are built differently, Kurzeme farms are different, Vidzeme is also different, and that’s how we gradually understand why we are the way we are.”
In order to reveal this understanding even more vividly and deeply, the museum invites you this Saturday to an unprecedented event “One day at our home”. It will be like stepping into a time machine 100 or 200 years into the past. All the farmsteads of the museum will come to life, people in costumes appropriate to the time will be active in them, they will feel the everyday life and honors of our ancestors, inviting the audience to join them.
Ethnographic open-air museum of Latvia
Photo: Publicity image
During a short tour of the upcoming developments in the homestead, event director Kārlis Anitens gives a verbal introduction: “If we are talking about the Kurzeme fishing village, then there we will act out the marriage of a fisherman’s daughter. Then, right next to it, we will have the opportunity to see how our ancient ancestors went fishing. It is known that fishermen, who lived on the seashore also grew something, and therefore in the third homestead there will be an opportunity to participate in such a common thing as gathering seaweed, because it was and still is a very good fertilizer , then there will be a really old Libyan tradition – waking the birds with all the rituals, as it happened. With the sprinkling of the Christmas tree, because the Libyans, waking the birds, decorated the tree.”
In Kurzeme’s farmer’s homestead, as already on Saturday, the family will go to the sauna, in Vidzeme’s fisherman’s homestead, they will prepare various fishing tools, such as pebble sinkers. There will be a church decoration and a holy moment in Usma Church.
“At the Vidzeme farmer’s farm, we will act out such a tradition as the arrival of Joske. Joske will be there with cabbage seeds, because it is cabbage day. But it will turn out that everything is messed up in the garden, and therefore with the help of visitors, we will have to try to understand which of the 20 types of seeds are really there are the necessary cabbage seeds. So there are such chores,” says the director of the event.
In the Zemgale peasant farm, there will be a big jurgi day, readings and singing in the Hernhüti meeting house, but everyone will learn to read and write in the residential school in Valmiera, reveals Kārlis Anitens: “The Latgale sajja will be one of the most colorful, because Latgale is such a land of adventure for us. There will be an utrupe In the middle of everything, a cow will be lost, and the potters of Latgale will be preparing to go to the market, because there was no bubble wrap in those days wind, the wings do not rotate, and seals are made, which were like sails, which were put on the wings so that they would rotate even in a small wind.”
The organizers of the event are very grateful to the amateur theaters and folklore ensembles for the great response, because they will be the ones who will interpret the various everyday and honor episodes in the museum gardens.
“More than 40 amateur theaters and 40 folklore ensembles have responded to us. We will be more than 900 people together on Saturday.
The responsibility with which they prepare is even admirable. A museum is a museum, it cannot give all its things to be used in performances, because those things have to be preserved for many hundreds of years. And the people of the theater in their regions, I think, have already found another collection to bring to the museum so that it can work,” says the director.
One of the most ambitious events dedicated to the centenary of the museum, “One day at our home”, will take place at the Open Air Museum on Saturday, May 11, from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., three entrances to the museum will be open for the convenience of visitors. On June 1 and 2, the applied art fair, which is so popular with many, will be held for the 52nd time in the museum.
