Traditional Romanian Culture for Kids in Bucharest

The Village Museum's autumn fair marks St. Dumitru's day, which in Romanian folk tradition opens the winter. Craftspeople from across the country sell traditional goods, and food stalls offer cozonac, plăcinte, cheeses, gingerbread, honey and seasonal jams.

Folk singers and dance ensembles perform on stage, and there's a family play for children, parents and grandparents. It's an easy outdoor wander that suits kids who like music and snacks.

A crafts fair where more than 80 makers from all over Romania sell what they made over the year: potters, spoon carvers, weavers, icon painters and confectioners. Kids can browse stalls of toys and sweets.

It ties into Saint Nicholas, when children get sweets and a small switch, so it's a gentle way into a Romanian winter tradition.

Carolers from across Romania come to the Village Museum in costume, bringing masked games, folk theater and carols, then join a parade of Christmas and New Year customs. Along the museum's alleys, a folk craftsmen's fair runs alongside stalls of traditional Christmas food.

Kids get their own creative workshops: making folk masks, sorcove and Christmas tree ornaments, or learning carols and listening to stories.

A courtyard fair of mărțișoare, the red-and-white tokens Romanians give each other on March 1 at the start of spring. Students, artists, craftspeople, designers and architects make and sell them, and the museum has run the fair for a quarter century.

Kids can try something sweet between stalls. It suits kids who enjoy browsing a market and picking out small handmade things.

Each spring the Village Museum, an open-air park of village houses, fills its alleys with folk craftspeople for Florii, the Orthodox Palm Sunday. Kids can watch eggs being painted by hand and Lazarus pies being made, browse the craft stalls, and catch Romanian folk ensembles on the Dumitra stage.

It works best as a come-and-go visit: wander at your own pace and stop wherever something catches a kid's eye.

Sânziene marks the start of the farming summer in Romanian villages, a feast full of rituals for health and luck. The Village Museum holds it across its open-air grounds, with a folk craft fair, traditional food, and folk dance and singing on the Dumitra stage.

Kids can join hands-on workshops in the museum's farmsteads, like weaving crowns of summer flowers. It suits families who like crafts and wandering outdoors.

An open-air village on the shore of Lake Herăstrău, made of 62 farmsteads moved here from regions across Romania: 40 houses, three churches and 15 craft workshops and technical installations, from the 17th to the early 20th century.

Kids walk 9 hectares of lanes, look into furnished peasant homes and compare gates and roofs between regions. The museum also hosts a folk craftsmen's fair and a winter customs festival.

An ethnographic museum in a Neo-Romanian building, holding more than 100,000 objects of village life: folk costumes, textiles and rugs, painted icons and pottery. The star is a whole peasant house from Gorj County rebuilt indoors, with a platform for peering into its attic.

A basement room keeps a wry display of Communist-era leftovers, and a wooden church brought from Bejan, in Hunedoara, stands in the inner courtyard.

Mogoșoaia Palace was built in 1702 by Constantin Brâncoveanu, in the Brâncovenesc style. Inside are the Museum of Court Tradition, a comparative art collection of about 300 pieces, plus around ten temporary shows a year in the ground-floor rooms and the old palace kitchen.

Outside the courtyard, an English-style park from 1921-1922 holds gardens, the 1688 Saint George church and the Bibescu greenhouses, now a children's art workshop.

Lake Snagov stretches 16 km through what is left of the old Vlăsia forests, with oak, lime and ash woods along the shore.

A footbridge leads to the island monastery, first recorded in 1408, whose 16th-century church holds a tombstone attributed to Vlad the Impaler (a 1933 dig found no remains). On the water there are rowboats, pedal boats, motorboats and small passenger boats.