Maramureș Village Museum "Mihai Dăncuș"

The Maramureș Village Museum stands on Dobăieș hill, in the Lazu Baciului district of Sighetu Marmației, at Strada Muzeului 1. It is named after Professor Mihai Dăncuș, the museum's director who made a major contribution to its founding. Collecting began in 1972, and the museum opened on 30 May 1981. The museum has more than 30 farmsteads, some fully furnished with original pieces, grouped by the sub-areas of historic Maramureș: Cosău-Mara, the Lower Iza as far as Strâmtura, the Middle Iza, Vișeu-Borșa, the Tisa area and the Ruscova basin. Alongside the Romanian farmsteads, a Ukrainian house, a Hungarian house and two Jewish houses have been rebuilt, one of them fitted out as a village synagogue. The houses have carved gates, door frames and porches decorated with archaic symbols, and there is also a pastoral area. All the lanes and paths of the reconstructed village lead to the wooden church brought from the village of Oncești in the Iza valley, the oldest building in the museum. The church was built from timber reused from an older church, with some beams dated by dendrochronology to between 1572 and 1614. The museum also presents traditional crafts and occupations, folk costume, furniture, textiles and ceramics, an exhibition on winter customs (mask plays, the Viflaim nativity play, and the "old women" and "old men" masks), icons on wood from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, glass icons from Nicula and a collection of bread stamps. The ensemble on Dobăieș hill is on the List of Historic Monuments as an "ensemble of vernacular architecture and technology" (LMI code MM-II-a-B-04668, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries). The museum is part of the Maramureș Museum in Sighetu Marmației, an institution of Maramureș County Council.