Liptov Village Museum

The Gothic-Renaissance manor house from Parížovice is the oldest preserved country house in Liptov from the 14th - 16th century and is associated with King Matej Korvín and his son Ján Korvín, Prince of Liptov. An attractive exhibition is the early Gothic church of the Virgin Mary from the village of Liptovská Mara with fragments of original murals from the 14th and 15th centuries. In the upper part of the museum there is a static exposition of the historic Považská forest railway.

The museum is situated behind the village Pribylina in the direction of Podbanská. From the highway, use the exit at Liptovský Hrádok. Possibility of transport by bus from Liptovský Hrádok, Liptovský Mikuláš, Tatras.

Establishment of the museum

The Liptovská Mara dam flooded the historically most important and most cultivated part of Liptov - the basin, which stretches in the Váh valley. The government decided to build it in 1964 and a year later construction began. In 1974, it began to fill up to a total volume of 360 million cubic meters of water. Below the surface of the dam lake remained completely or partially such important villages as Liptovská Mara, Parížovce, Sokolče, Ráztoky, Dechtáre, Paludza, Liptovská Sielnica, Bobrovník, Čemice, Prosiek - Zádiel, Vlachy, Vlašky, part of Liptovský Trnovec and Liptovská Ondrašová.

Not only the residences and dwellings of the people remained under the water, but also millennia of history, rare monuments and natural sites. Developed and built villages, human settlements, meadows - all this was irretrievably flooded by the waters of Váh. However, there were also rare cultural and historical monuments, property and memory of the nation in this environment, which must not be destroyed. It was necessary to preserve them. These were mainly the Gothic Roman Catholic Church of the Virgin Mary in Liptovská Mara, the Gothic Church of the Virgin Mary in Liptovská Sielnica, a wooden evangelical articular church in Paludz, a Gothic-Renaissance manor house in Parížovce, wooden log farm and craft houses, but also other tens of houses, mansions and mansions, monuments of wooden folk architecture. In order to save the most valuable movable and immovable monuments from this area, a project for their relocation was developed. In addition to the wooden articular church from Paludze, which was rebuilt as a living church in the village of Svätý Kríž, it was planned to build these monuments within the Museum of the Liptov Village in Pribylina. Its construction was connected with the intention of the Regional Institute of Monument Care and Nature Protection in Banská Bystrica - to build regional museums in nature as a form of preserving building culture.

The architectural study was prepared and the buildings for construction were selected by the director of the mentioned institute, Ing. arch. Stanislav Dubravec, CSc. His study was extensive and generous. It consisted of three units, which were to represent individual types of development of village settlements - a mass village with street buildings, a stream village with interesting water and technical structures and a form of chain settlement in which houses intended for tourist accommodation were to be built.

The creation of an open-air museum outside the village of Pribylina was decided at a meeting at the District National Committee in Liptovský Mikuláš in September 1971, and a year later the foundation stone of the future museum was laid. From 1973, the first buildings began to be built. Although there were sufficient funds in the first years, the construction went very slowly, as the general contractor Pamiatkostav Žilina did not have sufficient capacity to build an open-air museum. Finally, in 1990, due to lack of funds, construction stopped completely.

The construction of the open-air museum took more than 20 years, and when the Liptov Museum in Ružomberok took over its administration in 1991, it was just a construction site with an unfinished manor house and church, without farm buildings and small architecture. Thanks to the activities and hard work of the staff of the Ethnographic Museum in Liptovský Hrádok, the first expositions were opened in record time - from April to August.