All programme items

What do you do if the power suddenly goes off for a long time? Our annual exhibition shows how life used to function without electricity.

Rural clothing of the past was primarily work clothing that had to be practical and, above all, hard-wearing.

The exhibition spans an arc from the so-called farmer doctors and ‘all kinds of healing knowledge’ to forgotten household remedies, rural healing traditions and typical regional uses.

This annual exhibition focuses on the rural working year and its customs, festivals and celebrations. Hard farm labour and its structuring through customs and larger or smaller festivals once ensured a good balance between work and leisure.

The annual exhibition shows practical ways in which the farming population dealt with the weather using the resources available to them.

Trades such as peckers, ragpickers, root diggers and ant diggers have disappeared from our working world, once essential trades are threatened with extinction or have been replaced by machines. The changes in the world of work and everyday life have caused once indispensable professions and trades to be forgotten.

For a long time, food was based on nature and the respective conditions. However, it was not only the location, soil and climate that characterised Austria's everyday rural diet, the type of fireplace was also decisive for the different food landscapes in Austria.

The children on the farm were fully involved in the work process. Child labour, today a legal offence, was taken for granted. It was only with the introduction of compulsory schooling that a distinction was made between school time and leisure time. But in their free time, children had to help around the house, in the fields or in the barn.

Even an open-air museum cannot capture a true picture of past reality, but attempts to approximate historical truths. Numerous everyday memories, taken from a wealth of oral history interviews, tell of the diversity of daily life in the countryside of yesteryear in small fragments of everyday life.

In addition to the buildings, the holistic presentation of an open-air museum also includes the surroundings, the cultural landscape around them, woods and meadows, fields and home gardens. Our 2012 thematic focus provides insights into the development, use and diversity of farm gardens.

For thousands of years, forests have provided an irreplaceable habitat, protection against avalanches and mudflows, reduced the risk of flooding, helped to balance the climate, regulated the water balance and supplied one of the most essential energy sources and materials in human history - wood.

The farming year was inextricably linked to the rhythm of the seasons. The course of nature determined work and rest through the phases of growth and ripening. A wealth of customs and traditions developed from hard everyday labour and rest, the high points in the course of life and the combination of being at the mercy of others and deep piety.

Referring to the time in which Archduke Johann lived and worked and the life of his wife Anna Plochl, different themes are presented in various selected houses. The themes focus on the everyday lives of women in the town, farmers' wives and maidservants.

In Austria, there are two fundamentally different fireplaces: The oven and the cooker. In eastern Austria, the stove was at the centre of the home and life, in western Austria it was the hearth. Between these two landscapes is the intermediate stage of the smokehouse. Here, the oven and the hearth were combined, and both fireplaces could be used alternately.