The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant holds one of the most important and surprising ethnographic archive collections in the country. The world of the village and the urban universe come together in a multimedia radiography of daily life over the past 150 years: from 19th-century glass plate photography to the written oracles hidden under school desks by teenagers in the 2000s.
With over 80,000 archival units, accumulated through three institutional "legacies" (from the National Art Museum, the Folk Art Museum, and the History Museum of Romanian Communist Party) and enriched by donations, acquisitions, and the museum's own analog and digital productions resulting from its ongoing research and cultural activities.
Varied materials
The Ethnological Archive constitutes a specialized documentary archive that preserves an extraordinarily varied range of documentary materials:
Photographs
Glass plate negatives with gelatin silver bromide, film negatives (nitrate and cellulose acetate, polyester), vintage prints on photographic paper (albumen paper, collodion, gelatin silver), glass and film slides, stereoscopic plates and stereographs
Vintage photographic equipment
Cameras, slide viewers, and projectors
Audio recordings
Ebonite discs, audio cassettes, CDs
Video recordings
35mm film, 16mm film, VHS, BETA, Hi8, U-matic, MiniDV, DVDs
Historical archive
Administrative archives and historical institutional correspondence
Research archive
Field notes, research files, exhibition files
Family collections
Journals, family albums, recipe books, and other personal writings
Graphic and plastic art
Architectural projects, decorative model boards, sketchbooks, naive art; paintings (oil, watercolor, tempera), graphics, lithography, mixed media
