The History and Ethnography Museum

The building, where the Tîrgu Neamţ History and Ethnography Museum functions, is an architectural monument and it was built between 1852 and 1853. From the 1st of June 1853 the “Şcoala Domnească” was settled here, and then it became “Şcoala Nr.1 Tîrgu Neamţ”. The school began its classes in the “language of the country”, under the name “Școala Nr. 1 de băieți”.
Among its students there was the great storyteller Ion Creangă, the philosopher Vasile Conta, the philologist Al. Lambrior and Nicolae Munteanu, who further became – under the name of Nicodim Munteanu – the patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, and the professors Isaia Teodorescu (Popa Duhu), Grigore Conta and Gheorghe Cosmovici who became known as true pioneers of the modern Romanian pedagogy.

In the museum’s courtyard a thematic park is set up, “The Country of Creangă”. Here, tourists can enter the atmosphere of the writer’s childhood together with the characters which remind them of the everlasting episodes from Memories of my Boyhood and also of the stories Punguța cu doi bani, Capra cu trei iezi, or even the story of the lazy man from Prostia omenească.

Officially, the Museum came into being in 1957, functioning as a building near the city’s park. It initially had exhibitions that came from the objects discovered after the archeological researches developed at the Neamţ Citadel, by the teachers Ilie Milea and Dumitru Constantinescu, starting with 1939. For a long time, the Museum from Tîrgu Neamţ was considered the Citadel’s Museum.
In order to reach its current form the museum passed through several stages that start from the first museum exhibition in 1940, goes through the period when from 1968 it was reorganized in the building of the old “Sfat Popular Raional”, and in 1977 it was transferred in the current building.

The current form of the exhibition was established between 1986 and 1987, when the initial exhibition of the museum was completely reorganized becoming the Tîrgu Neamţ History and Ethnography Museum.

The History division of the Museum exposes, on the one hand, archeological vestiges discovered in the area of the City of Tîrgu Neamţ, which prove that here there was one of the oldest inhabited settlements in the Moldavia region, dating back in the Neolithic and the Bronze epoch, and on the other, exhibitions that confirm the richness of its medieval history.

For an incursion into the world of traditional handicrafts from the area of Neamţ, the History and Ethnography Museum is a central point. You can learn here about the equipments built by the countrymen, the traditional working techniques and instruments, the folk clothes of the area, and also the interior textiles specific to the ethnographic area of Tîrgu Neamţ.