Hollókő Village Museum

The Hollókő Village Museum is located in the Ófalui part (Kossuth u. 82). The visitor can see the equipment and tools necessary for the former inhabitants' way of life.

Creation

It opened in 1964 as part of the Hollókő monument ensemble. Museum exhibition space. Its reception building is a so‑called single‑room, three‑room, mud‑built, thatched, white‑washed old peasant house. Its gable roof is covered with tile shingles. The designer of its restoration was Gazda Anikó. Its permanent folk‑culture exhibition was arranged by the Palóc Museum in Balassagyarmat. The village museum presents the life of a three‑member family (child and elderly parents) at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries using furniture types, household objects and tools used at that time.

The Collection

The old peasant house with three rooms that houses the permanent folk‑culture exhibition. The furnishings shown in it are intended to illustrate a 1920s dwelling and way of life.

A beautiful example of Palóc architecture: three‑storey, with a cellar, gable roof, a thatched roof, and a wooden‑plank‑covered eaves, which on most houses also extends in front of the street façade.

The part of the street‑facing façade that is closed in a triangle, the material and decorative style of the gable are as characteristic of Palócland as the stone‑columned porch that spread from the second third of the 19th century, or the type of heating equipment that consisted of a square internal firebox with a chimney and a flue system without a chimney, which was replaced by a beehive oven.

Peasant houses generally had a living room, a front room and a pantry. Later one could reach the front and rear rooms from the front room. The front house was then turned into a clean room. The largest and economically most important buildings in the courtyard are the granary or barn.

Typical Palóc furniture pieces are the sitting or storage items (low chair, small chair, water chair, etc.). The rose‑adorned, turreted beds, the ornate carved wardrobes or lacquered, painted chests, the large‑drawer, so‑called spread‑leg tables are also old memories of Palóc interior furnishing. In the rooms, among the holy pictures, the so‑called “cifratányérok” placed in pairs were common.

Traditional Palóc houses mostly consist of three rooms: from the vestibule one entered directly into the pitvar, i.e., the kitchen, from which the clean room opened toward the street front, inhabited by the head of the house with his family; backward was the living chamber, in which grain was stored, and which was also the elders’ sleeping place.