"Night of the Museums" moves to the rural environment

The local rural environment proposes a cultural premiere. The first edition of the "Night of the Museums in the Villages" event will take place on Saturday, September 2, 2023, and offers the public over a hundred objectives, cultural events, and educational programs organized by museum entities or private organizations, in spaces of historical and heritage value in the villages and municipalities of 32 counties in Romania. A first in Europe, the new cultural brand proposed by the National Network of Museums invites visitors to discover an unknown world of Romania's rural spaces: museums and museum collections, memorial houses, preserved rural households in situ, castles, noble estates, fortresses, fortified wooden churches, art and religious history collections of monastic ensembles, parish museums, art centers, workshops, cultural centers, mills, mausoleums, barns, fire stations, and many other attractions. On the occasion of this inaugural edition of the event, the National Network of Museums in Romania has also launched a national campaign to develop educational programs for children and young people from rural communities, through which participants registered for the event can promote and exploit their collections and cultural heritage. In collaboration with the "Da'DeCe" Association, the NNMR has created an educational KIT, available for free to all interested parties on the Night of the Museums in the Villages website, in the Pedagogical Resources section. Iulia Iordan, a specialist in cultural education at the "Da'DeCe" Association and the author of the educational package for the Night of the Museums in the Villages, stated: "For museums and entities from all over the country that have announced their participation in the Night of the Museums in the Villages and, generally, for those interested in designing programs for the public, we have created an educational kit dedicated to museum educators and curators. The kit includes various approaches to public events in a participatory manner, a flexible structure of a museum education workshop tailored to different age groups, examples of specific activities, and practical suggestions for creating resources for self-guided visits or props for organized workshops. (...) This interaction will undoubtedly give birth to very valuable new ideas that I can't wait to discover in the smallest museums in Romania. I encourage you to mark September 2nd on your calendar for a journey from village to village." The project was launched and coordinated by the National Network of Museums in Romania and co-financed by the AFCN.