ASTRA National Museum Complex

About

"ASTRA" National Museum Complex (Romanian: Complexul Naţional Muzeal "ASTRA") is a museum complex in Sibiu, Romania, which gathers under the same authority four ethnology and civilisation museums in the city, a series of laboratories for conservation and research, and a documentation centre. It is the successor of the ASTRA Museum that has existed in the city since 1905. Its modern life started with the opening of The Museum of Folk Technology in 1964, now The "ASTRA" Museum of the Traditional Folk Civilization.

The Romanian cultural association ASTRA decided in 1897 to establish a museum of Romanian civilisation as a "shelter for keeping the past". The museum was opened in 1905, under the supervision of Cornel Diaconovici, in what is today the ASTRA Palace in Sibiu, built through a public subscription with the specific purpose of creating a museum. In 1929, in Cluj, an open-air Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania was created, and in 1932 the Village Museum was opened in Bucharest by Dimitrie Gusti. In 1940, after the loss of Northern Transylvania to Hungary due to the Second Vienna Award, a plan was proposed to establish a new ethnographic museum in Sibiu to replace...