Skanseny: Muzea na wolnym powietrzu w Polsce (The Open-Air Museums of Poland)
Photographed by Jan Sieraczkiewicz
Text by Jan Swiech

This album is the first of its kind in Polish publishing, presenting all the 29 open-air museums in Poland photographed by Jan Sieraczkiewicz, described by the ethnographer Jan Swiech.

Extracted from introduction:
Open-air museums, skansen in their Scandinavian name, have a rich specialist literature, but this is the first time in their nigh on a hundred years' presence on Polish soil that an album is being published about them. This is an invaluable undertaking, since open-air museums display the cultures of particular social groups and pass onto posterity what ôdwells in a nation's soulö. In the Polish cultural tradition there is a marked contribution from building in wood. Unfortunately the preservation of wooden edifices in situ has proved extremely difficult, and often impossible in practice. But in the open-air museums the architecture of the buildings and the natural features of the chosen site, magnificent trees, water, and the gardens laid out around the homestead with their traditional cultivation of plants and flowers, usually offer faithful reproductions of a forgotten rural landscape and its arrangement, a region's past and tradition. It's a pity that the nearly 60 open-air museums, which have assembled over a thousand large, and several thousand large, and several thousand small, architectural units are providing protection for only a small fraction of what is registered in the catalogues of historic objects and should be saved at all costs.

Publishing House: BOSZ, Olszanica 1999
Hardcover book measuring 8.5" x 12"
192 pages, 200 photographs
Bilingual Polish / English Language Version

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