Attraction
„Calistrat Hogaș” Memorial Museum, Piatra Neamț
The Calistrat Hogaș Memorial Museum occupies the house in central Piatra Neamț where the writer Calistrat Hogaș, who died in 1917, lived. It is part of the Neamț National Museum Complex and reopened in April 2025 after an EU-funded restoration.
Foto: Emilia Ţuţuianu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The museum stands at 1 Calistrat Hogaș Street in the centre of Piatra Neamț, a few steps from the high school named after the writer. The property has two buildings linked by a wooden porch on wooden posts, a garden pavilion, a summer kitchen and a well, and keeps the look of a late 19th-century Moldavian market-town house.
The house dates from around 1840 and was rebuilt around 1880. It belonged to archpriest Costache Gheorghiu, the writer's father-in-law. Calistrat Hogaș, born in Tecuci, came to Piatra Neamț in September 1869 as a teacher at the newly founded town gymnasium (today the Petru Rareș National College) and lived on this property from 1871. He died in Roman on 28 August 1917. His daughter, Sidonia Hogaș, set up a first display of his personal belongings in one of the rooms in 1939, and in 1967 she donated the house and the whole property to the state. The memorial museum officially opened in 1969. The buildings were restored in 1967-1968 and 1990-1994.
The main exhibition, arranged in 1994 after Sidonia Hogaș's memoir „Tataia”, fills six rooms and recreates the early 20th-century interior. Sidonia donated or sold more than 300 memorial objects to the state: period furniture, stoves, carpets, photographs and paintings, the writer's desk and lamp, the hat, cape and compass he used on his walks in the Neamț mountains, a Lefaucheux revolver and an ashtray made from a hoof of his mare „Pisicuța”. The manuscripts, correspondence and photographs are kept in the museum's storage. In the courtyard is a travertine bust of the writer by Vasile Aciobăniței (1963).
The house is a listed historic monument, LMI code NT-II-m-B-10565. The museum belongs to the Neamț National Museum Complex, which reports to the Neamț County Council. Under the project „Conservarea, protejarea și promovarea Muzeului Memorial «Calistrat Hogaș» Piatra-Neamț” (SMIS code 116528), co-financed through the Regional Operational Programme 2014-2020, the house was restored and the museum reopened to the public on 17 April 2025.
Strada Calistrat Hogaș nr. 1, Piatra Neamț, județul Neamț