Latvian Open Air museum (Riga)

 park, open air museum, fenced area

The museum was founded in 1924. Eight years later, when the museum was opened to the visitors, it became a true cultural institution in the republic of Latvia. It may well be that people began to seek the links between Latvia as a nation state and the content and form of the museum.

www.brivdabasmuzejs.lv/lv/muzejs

"The Open-air Ethnographic Museum wishes to collect the cultural manifestations of our nation in the same way that they were created and used in the past. We hope to depict scenes which preserve the content of life in antiquity, as depicted in buildings, their surroundings, their contents, their interiors, and their objects of everyday life and work". That is how the mission of the museum was described in 1932 by Pauls Kundzins , the museum's founder and director of construction.

Fifty years later similar description of the open air museum was offered by the Association of European Open Air Museums.*

Active cultural and social life began at the museum in the latter half of the 1930s. Increasing numbers of people visited the museum, and the initial mission of collecting and researching factors of the people's lives in the past was supplemented with various public and political activities.

A total of 38 rural buildings (farmsteads, workshops for craftsmen, etc.) were installed at the museum before World War II.

During the war, it became clear that there would be difficulties in protecting the museum's collection. The war did not destroy any of the buildings on the grounds, although windows and doors were broken and roofs ended up with holes in them for a variety of other reasons.

When the war was over, the Soviet institutions of government began to cast doubt on the extent to which the museum's mission and content were in line with Communist ideology. The situation became stable only in 1964, when a detailed development plan was adopted. The text of this plan was ideological in nature, with certain bows toward socio-economic considerations, but the fact is that with a few exceptions, the view of the museum's future was scientifically justified. In the 1970s and 1980s, the museum brought in 80 new buildings and established two affiliates in situ. The museum's infrastructure was vastly improved. Sadly, the absence of a market economy in Soviet Latvia prohibited the optimal preservation of the collection and the restoration of buildings that were brought to the museum. In 55 years after the war, 10 ancient buildings burned down. An analysis of the situation made it clear that protection of the museum's holdings was by no means guaranteed. The fact that similar fires had occurred at open-air museums in Poland, Estonia and the Netherlands was of little comfort.

The fact is that the museum possesses buildings that are 100, 200 or 300 years old, are made of wood, and have straw, reed or wooden roofs. They are enormously susceptible to the dangers of fire. The situation is a difficult one. The fact is that it is very difficult to protect 84 hectares of territory in a fairly remote suburban area.

Chemical preservation of the building materials at the museum was environmentally hazardous, and when major political and economic changes began to occur in the early 1990s, the museum's issues were pushed onto the back burner. People and institutions which should have been responsible for safety at the museum did not pay much attention. It was only after fires in 1999 and 2000 that the state provided funding for an alarm system and improved security services. It became clear that only the physical presence of guards at the site would allow for a proper monitoring of the situation at the site. Chemicals are no longer used to treat the wood, because the reaction of very old wood to the new chemicals cannot be predicted, and it is not clear how these chemicals affect the way in which the wood burns if it catches fire. The bottom line is that since 2000, the modern definition of the Latvian Ethnographic Open-air Museum's mission - to study, research and restore exhibits at the museum and to introduce people to those exhibits - has carefully been balanced with the museum's security needs. The threat of terrorism and violence in the world in the recent past has provided indirect testimony to the need for this. The cause of the fires at the museum has never been determined. Perhaps we just need to remember the wise words of Arthur Hazelius, the founder of the Skansen open-air museum in Sweden: The day may come when all of our gold will not pay for the ability to see scenes from the past in nature.