Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia CommonsOpole Open-Air Village Museum (Muzeum Wsi Opolskiej). In the Turi app, the same map shows your position, guides you from point to point and lets you tick off the places you’ve visited.
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The Opole Open-Air Village Museum is in Opole-Bierkowice; it was established in 1961 and opened to visitors on 23 September 1970. On just over 10 hectares, 49 wooden buildings from all over the Opole region have been rebuilt, grouped into farmsteads by region and by how well-off their owners were, from the cottage of a poor watchman to the large farms of wealthy farmers. Besides cottages, barns and granaries, there is the wooden church from Gręboszów from 1613, a school, an inn and a village shop, a smithy, a watermill and two post mills. A canal with footbridges runs around the whole site, and the cottages have front gardens and vegetable and herb gardens.
Photo Przykuta, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons1The cottage from Turze was built in 1814 of logs, with elements of post-and-plank construction, and roofed with reed. It is the house of a fishing farmstead from the Koźle and Racibórz area. The interior is furnished as a river fisherman's family from around Kędzierzyn-Koźle and Racibórz lived between the wars: with furniture, household items and many small objects of the period.
Photo Przykuta, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons2From the outside, this mid-19th-century barn from Podlesie looks as it always did: a timber-frame structure and a gabled roof covered with tiles. Inside, modern solutions have been used, because the building is used for exhibitions and educational activities. It houses the permanent exhibition ‘Głos mają ryby’ (The Fish Have Their Say), linked to the fishing farmstead. The exhibition makes sounds that may bother people who are sensitive to stimuli.
Photo Zala, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons3The manor farm granary from Sławięcice is the largest building in the museum's collection. The walls combine log and post-and-plank construction, and the whole building is covered by a broken mansard roof of shingles. Inside there are two storeys and two usable attic levels, and now also a permanent exhibition on farming in the Silesian countryside from 1850 to 1945.
Photo Przykuta, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons4The gate from Brzezinki is a replica of part of a gate from 1753 and 1754. It was built in 1971 to serve visitors in the season. It stands in the group of granaries on ul. Wrocławska, and its two steep shingled gables and wooden arches can be seen from afar.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons5This granary from Głogówek, from the early 19th century, is of the domed type, built in log and post-and-plank construction and plastered with clay on the outside, which is why it is white. The shingle roof with a half-hip is not fixed to the main body. Inside is the permanent exhibition ‘Krucha sztuka, czyli od kurzego jaja do opolskiej kroszonki’ (Fragile Art: from a Hen's Egg to an Opole Kroszonka) about the tradition of decorating Easter eggs.
Photo Przykuta, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons6The cottage from Budkowice was built in 1812 of logs and thatched with straw. A through hallway divides it into two parts. On the right is the former farm part with a place for a horse and a small cowshed, where the minor crafts the farmers practised are now on show. On the left is the main room with an unusual bread oven, whose firebox is in the chimney in the hallway.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons7A mill in Siołkowice Stare was mentioned as early as 1566, and in 1832 it was moved 250 metres downstream to make better use of the fall of the water. The most eye-catching part is the wooden wheel, 4.7 metres across, which drove the whole mechanism. Inside is the original machinery, completed with parts from the disused mill in Bierkowice. The mill stands by the canal dug around the open-air museum.
Photo Przykuta, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons8The cottage from Antoniów was already standing in 1840, when it partly burned down, as recalled by the inscription ‘gebrand 1840’ on a beam. Before the Second World War, when Lake Turawa was being created, the whole cottage was moved 50 metres so that the water would not flood it. It is the only cottage in the museum with a veranda over the entrance, known as a lauba. Inside there is a black room furnished in the village style and a white room following town fashion.
Photo Przykuta, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons9The granary from Domaszowice dates from 1754. It is a two-storey building with a small gallery, built of logs on a rectangular plan, with a shingle roof whose wide eaves project over the gallery. The gable is clad with boards laid diagonally in a herringbone pattern.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons10The cottage from Kup was built in 1844. It is a broad-fronted house with a shingle roof, and its gables are clad with boards laid diagonally in a herringbone pattern. The hallway, kitchen, main room and two storerooms recreate a home from between the wars and the workshop of a village tailor who belonged to a guild.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons11The cottage was built in 1827, as confirmed by a long inscription on a ceiling beam with the names of the founder and the carpenter. In the middle of the wide house stands a chimney that was also used as a smokehouse. In the black room, the cooking and baking stove takes up most of the space, and in the festive white room there is a loom for weaving linen cloth. Children can look out for a dog-shaped boot jack and a glass fly trap.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons12The cottage from Kamieniec was built in 1745 and rebuilt in 1797. This broad-fronted house has a hallway, a main room and a storeroom, and a tall roof smoothly thatched with straw, with gables clad in vertical boards. The furnishings match a moderately well-off farm from the middle of the 19th century. It was put up at the museum even before it opened in 1970.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons13This early 19th-century cottage from Karmonki Nowe houses two displays from between the wars: a village shop and an inn. There is original furniture, product advertisements, a bar counter and a games table with what is called a grzybek (little mushroom). The shop sign hangs above the entrance, and a dovecote stands in front of the cottage.
Photo Zala, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons14Under two long open-sided shelters in the northern part of the museum there is a permanent exhibition of farm machinery, ‘Mechanizacja rolnictwa na wsi śląskiej’ (Farm Mechanisation in the Silesian Countryside). It tells the short history of farm mechanisation in Silesia from the middle of the 19th century to the 1940s, when farm technology was flourishing. Among the machines is a Lanz Bulldog D7500 tractor from 1941.
Photo Zala, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons15The bell tower from Gola has a post-and-beam frame clad in boards and a hipped shingle roof. On the roof there is a metal weathervane in the shape of a little flag with the date 1871 cut into it. Take a look at the arched wooden lintel over the entrance and the window openings under the eaves.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons16When this cottage was being dismantled, the inscription ‘Fundator Strzelczok 1859’ was discovered on one of its beams. Today it houses an old village school: the classroom has old desks and the teacher's desk, and maps and charts hang on the walls. The other part has the teacher's home, with a room and a small kitchen. In the hallway an arched chimney with a hearth and smokehouse has survived, and gardens bloom in front of the house.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons17The smithy from Ziemiełowice was built in 1726, as an inscription on the door lintel tells us. It has log walls and a shingle roof extended forward on three posts, forming a roomy arcade. Inside there is a brick forge, bellows, anvils, a tall horn anvil, and hammers and tongs from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Sometimes you can hear metal being forged here.
Photo Dawid Galus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, Wikimedia Commons18The cottage from Radłów, known as the hospital, was built in 1823 of spruce and fir logs and thatched with straw. The interior shows a village home from the 1920s, when the modernisation of the countryside was changing the layout and furnishings of homes, especially after 1924. The cottage was put up at the museum even before it opened in 1970.
Photo Zala, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons19The windmill from Dobrzeń Wielki is a post mill built in 1734 in Pokój, moved to Dobrzeń Wielki in 1885 and rebuilt at the end of the 19th century. At the museum it stands on an artificial hill piled up while the open-air museum was being built. Inside, the old milling machinery has survived almost complete, and wooden outside stairs lead up to the door.
Photo Zala, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons20The windmill from Grotowice, from the first half of the 19th century, is a post mill, a windmill that was turned as a whole on its base to set its sails to the wind. It has framed walls clad in vertical boards and a shingle roof with a half-hip on the sail side. Outside stairs lead to the entrance, and inside is the original milling machinery.
Photo Zala, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons21The wooden church moved here from Gręboszów was funded in 1613 by the owner of the village. It was built of larch logs, and the post-and-beam tower was added later on the west side. It is a single-nave church without a separate chancel, typical of Protestant churches. It came to the museum in parts in 1973, and inside, look out for the altar of St Catherine of Alexandria and the pulpit from the early 17th century.
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