The Museum of folk architecture, life and children creative work in Prelestnoe village of Slavyansk district of Donetsk region is a unique place on the east of Ukraine.
It was established in the most picturesque place of Donbass in 1983 by efforts of one enthusiast and artist Aleksandr Ivanovich Shevchenko. Now there is a whole architectural complex with an ancient wattle and daub hut, a forge, a small free-standing village workshop, and a real windmill in this reserve of national identity.
The hut with its whitewashed walls and an attic covered with straw, and with jugs on the wicker paling is an integral sign of the Ukrainian village in Slobozhanshchyna at the end of the 19th – at the beginning of the 20th centuries. The level of man’s prosperity was emphasized by a chamber where grain, farming stock and different household utensils: chisels, planes, smoothing planes – were kept…
Old forge
Melodious chime of hammers invites excursionists to the working forge. This one-room building constructed at the end of the 20th century is equipped with a furnace, an anvil, and a set of blacksmiths tools with small and big hammers. Here are also works by a village blacksmith and a cauldron with water for hardening of forged tools.
Village citizens respected blacksmiths very much as they considered them wizards and magicians who mastered a mysterious art of turning metal into useful things. They used to come here to have а sickle, a knife, a scythe made, get a plough repaired, and a horse shoed or just communicate. A forge was some kind of an original village men’s club.
Welcome to Prelestnoe!
Ukrainian people could feel happy with their life even in the hardest time. They tried to decorate everything with fretwork, embroidery, ornaments. Every article was an art work. Even now they demonstrate a great talent of Ukrainian people to visitors of Prelestnoe village. Some of the large museum halls are full with handmade articles and paintings by children from Italy, Bulgaria, Canada, the USA, the Baltic states and, of course, Ukraine.
In 1992 the Museum was given a status of state one and became a branch of the Donetsk Regional Art Museum. About three thousand people from Ukraine and abroad come here every year. It has a giant educational and recreational potential. Come and see it yourself! Take the 200 hundred years old windmill with its gear alone! We also invite our friends-blacksmiths from Russia and the European Union to work at the old Ukrainian forge.