„Samuil and Eugenia Ioneț” Ethnographic Museum, Rădăuți

The „Samuil and Eugenia Ioneț” Ethnographic Museum is at no. 63, Piața Unirii, in the centre of Rădăuți, Suceava County, on the ground floor of a building put up in 1860 in an Austro-Hungarian style and listed as an architectural monument. Collecting began in 1920, and in 1926 the teachers Samuil and Eugenia Ioneț opened a first exhibition in their own home, later moved to the school run by Samuil Ioneț. The official opening took place in April 1934, and the museum bore its founders' names from the start. The collection had grown to about 10,000 objects, which were lost in 1944, during the war; some of them are now in the Ethnographic Museum in Chișinău. Samuil Ioneț and Vasile Fundu reopened the museum in 1948. In 1970 it moved to the present building. The main exhibition, „Tehnici populare bucovinene”, is still in place today. In 1983, on the initiative of the director Dragoș Cusiac, the Rădăuți pottery fair was revived. The museum holds more than 9,200 items in 13 collections, of which about 1,000 are on display in 11 rooms covering more than 900 m². On show are pottery from Rădăuți, Kuty, Păltinoasa and Siret and the black pottery of Marginea, tools for working flax, hemp and wool, household textiles, folk costume, jewellery, furniture, objects of horn, bone and metal, icons and traditional technical installations such as oil presses, a fulling mill for homespun coats, hand mills and winnowers. A pottery workshop operates in the museum, where Florin Colibaba, descendant of the master potter Constantin Colibaba, works, and the painting collection is used for temporary exhibitions. The museum is run by Rădăuți City Hall and is open to visitors.