Situated in the village of Sirogojno on the plateau of Mt. Zlatibor, Old Village Open-Air Museum features authentic buildings constructed in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Log cabins, houses and cottages provide a faithful depiction of the traditional rural architecture of the time.
The museum spreads across five hectares and includes more than 60 structures carried over from the nearby villages on Mt. Zlatibor, grouped into several units. The structures were carefully handpicked to illustrate the richness of architecture, the development of the culture of living and the way of life in this mountainous region.
The outstanding workmanship of the builders created the traditional Dinaric log cabins – small in size, but extraordinarily beautiful. Chiselled planks were stacked on top of one another horizontally on stone foundations to create walls. The steep, tall roof was covered with hay, boards or stone, with a cone-shaped chimney rising from it.
The permanent display includes two authentic Zlatibor households, which provide a glimpse into the life of a typical rural family in this region more than a century ago. The trade section of the display comprises different structures used for livestock keeping and breeding, including a stable, a sheep enclosure and a pig sty, as well as structures used for curing plums and distilling “rakija”.
A separate complex of structures – the cattleman’s home – is erected in a place where shepherds used to graze their cattle in the summer and includes log cabins, a mobile cabin for shepherds called a “kućer“, small mobile houses, sheepfolds and pens.
In Sirogojno you can buy clothes, pottery, rugs and foods all made according to centuries-old tradition. Souvenirs are mostly made in workshops within the museum, which preserve the old crafts from the period, including coopering, pottery-making, smithery and basket-weaving.