Open air museum Stübing
As the largest and only national open-air museum in Austria, it displays the formative historical architectural styles of the various federal provinces.
Written on the village school blackboard are the German words for “Anna eats an apple”, but today’s kids can no longer read that writing style. It’s an all but lost world of rural life and work, living on in around a hundred original farm buildings in a remote tributary valley by the river Mur. At the Austrian Open Air Museum Stübing you can stroll across the whole of Austria and, in an idyllic setting, find out about regionally typical tools and the ways of construction and life of yesteryear.
Details
What is a "Rauchkuchl" (smoke kitchen)? What were the huge pans hanging on the houses used for? From kilns to wine presses, from sgraffito decorating the typical Upper Austrian farmstead to a "mouseproof" barn from Tyrol - at the Austrian Open-Air Museum you will surely be impressed by the inventiveness of our forefathers who knew exactly how to combine function and aesthetics in the buildings and tools they produced.
In 1962, the Graz humanist Professor Viktor Herbert Pöttler - supported by the Austrian Federal Government and all nine Austrian provincial governments - founded the Austrian Open-Air Museum Stübing. Professor Pöttler spent decades tracking down regionally typical dwelling and service buildings, mills, wayside shrines and workshops, often under threat in their original locations. The buildings were reduced to their component parts and re-constructed in Stübing using traditional building methods. Now, nearly one hundred objects blend in harmoniously in the 60-hectare wooded valley, as if they had always been there: the thatched farmstead from Burgenland, the historic grocery from Western Styria or the huge Alpine dairy hut from Vorarlberg. Old household artefacts fill the furnished rooms and original tools are laid out ready for use. Fresh flowers from the colourful farm gardens fill the vases on the tables, sheep and goats are graze in the pastures. Here and there, you can look over the shoulder of a wood carver, a man sewing baskets or a woman working at a spinning wheel. The numerous interactive adventure days often relate to festivities in the farmer's year. The visitors become part of traditional rural life and can dabble in old handicrafts themselves.
By the way: The bread that you can enjoy with delicious homemade spreads at the refreshment corner is baked in the historic oven on site.
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