Visit Thuringia’s Largest Open-Air Museum!

These buildings — unique testimonies of Thuringian rural architecture — are saved from demolition, restored in the museum, and authentically furnished. This allows our visitors to gain the most realistic possible impression of how people lived and worked in the distant and recent past.

This also means that visitors can not only experience the everyday life of wealthy farming families in their large and splendid houses, but also the cramped and modest conditions of a shepherd’s house.

Open-air museums stand for a “holistic approach”: they do not only display buildings filled with a variety of large and small objects. An open-air museum also includes the surroundings in which the buildings once stood: gardens with historical varieties of fruit and vegetables, old livestock breeds, paths and squares, and traditionally cultivated fields.