The village of Prikazy is located near Olomouc in the northeastern part of the Czech Republic. The first written mention of Prikazy dates back to 1250. Originally, Příkazy belonged to a few small noblemen, but gradually it became the property of the Church and from 1368 the whole of Příkazy belonged to the Olomouc Diocese.

Until the 17th century, references to Příkazy are sporadic and do not tell anything about the village itself or the houses there and the lives of their inhabitants. In the second half of the 17th century, their residents’ names appear for the first time, and the oldest structures of the homes and their parts, which are still preserved today, probably date from the same period.

The Hana Open-Air Museum organizes a collection of movable and immovable documents on the history of folk culture, manages a collection of objects of ethnographic character and objects of folk architecture situated in the village conservation reserve, and documents folk culture from the Hana ethnographic region.

All the buildings date from the 19th century and are evidence of local traditional architecture. The rich furnishings of the open-air museum make it possible to see many aspects of life in Hana, especially at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The complex of folk buildings in Prikazy (commonly known as “Hanacke skanzen”) forms a village monument reservation number 54. It consists of a barn made in the unique local vernacular style and adjacent gardens with three additional barns.

The core of the ethnographic Hana Open-Air Museum is Kamenichek’s ground, dating from the second half of the 19th century, around which there are four almost 200-year-old gabled barns – chunky buildings with an entrance in the gable walls. There is also a housing exhibition, a special section dedicated to washing and ironing, and a collection of children’s toys. The barns house agricultural machinery and tools used in field work, such as threshers and the engines that power them, as well as tools from various craft workshops.

An important complement to the regular guided tours is the opportunity to experience, for example, traditional days of earthen construction, interactive demonstrations of traditional harvesting and threshing, where visitors can try out these formerly common rural chores for themselves.

Hana Open-Air Muzeum is a place, where history breathes.

For more information about the museum click here, and about Olomouc Region, from which this this folk tradition comes, click here.

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