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COLLECTIONS
“The museum has a patrimony of around eight thousand items, organized in thirteen collections, of which one thousand are displayed in the permanent exhibition and the others are preserved in four modernized storage rooms. The collections that stand out are: the old books and manuscripts, the paintings and icons collection, the pottery, the wood, the metal, bone and leather collections, the musical instruments and customs collection, the painted eggs, traditional ornaments and popular costumes collections.” (Traian Postolache – museum manager)
THE POTTERY
The beginning of clay moulding and its consequent shaping into a range of pots and rite objects, for household or decorative purposes, dates back to ancient times.
The collection of our museum consists mainly of traditional folk pottery with some remarkable items, suggesting an intense practice of this handicraft in the Radauti area, where pottery artists still exist nowadays.
The display of the exhibits reflects the characteristics of the local pottery from Radauti, of the Kuty pottery and of the black ceramics of Marginea.
Old pots discovered during archaeological excavations or those belonging to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are on display here, along with tools used in this handicraft: from the clay extracted from a local soil “vein”, to the kilns used in those times.
In contrast with this style, the black ceramics of Marginea surprises through the simplicity and elegance given by shape, colour and size balance.
Exhibits from pottery- centers such as: Horezu, Baia Mare, Vrancea, Botoşani, Dorohoi, Corund complete one of the richest collections in our museum.
The Wood Colection
Bukovina is a land rich in forests and this has enabled the use of wood as raw material in all the fields of human activities and its crafting and artistic decoration.
The wood collection contains about 1000 items and is one of the most impressive collections of the museum. It consists mainly of household tools, furniture articles and technical devices. The domestic textile industry includes important items such as: the distaff made of sycamore maple wood and enriched with geometrical designs, the spinning wheels, the reels, the weaving looms.
As an important furniture article in the traditional village house, the bed displays the most wonderful textures and the wedding trunk is usually decorated with notches or painted. One can also see here spoons of different sizes with geometrical notches or animal symbols as decorations.
One of the museums halls is dedicated to the technical devices used in processing different raw materials: felting mill for wheat-peeling, for crushing salt or oily seeds or for unrolling the maize seeds, baskets, old traditional barrels for storing cereals, grinding mills, oil presses. A very interesting device is a felting mill activated by running water used to transform the woolen cloth into thick material for the long coats worn by the farmers. The device is an acquisition from Badeuti, a village near Radauti.
Metal, Bone and Leather
Metal, bone and leather objects, used by the royal courts, the army, the townsmen or villagers, can be found throughout all the regions of the medieval Moldavia and even more in Bukovina, where the necessary raw materials and the political and economical conditions encouraged the development of the handicrafts.
The metal is processed by forging and stamping iron, casting tin or engraving copper. The objects made of forged iron have got the stamp of the craftsman through different signs. Beside massive locks, safety locks or door handles, even the work tools, such as knives, scales or earthen lamps, are 
decorated. The craftsmen of the ”hutuli” people are very skilful in processing copper.
Along side the cold metal, the antlers and the thick tacked leather blend together in wonderful works, whose importance is almost forgotten in front of the overwhelming decorations. Hunting bags, gun powder horns or copper hatchets with thin wooden handles, engraved with circles, broken lines, dots and vegetal motifs recall the hunting atmosphere, including man, prey and forest.
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Customs and Musical Instruments
During the temporary exhibitions dedicated to the winter holidays, which are organised every year in the White Room of the museum or at the Art Galeries, the typical atmosphere of the old times is revived through the rich collection of folk masks and other objects used in ancient customs.
The small bell, the whip and the so called ”buhai” (a wooden barrel, covered at one end by a calf’s skin, through which a bunch of horse hair is pulled, creating a specific sound) are typical for the ”Plugusor” (a custom which consists of children congratulating every family on New Year’s Eve).
For the custom of going with the so called “Steaua” (which literally means “Star”), people carry little stars 
decorated with mirrors, tinsel and coloured ribbons, in the middle of which a paper icon is placed. The so called “ugly ones”, stand out from the noisy group of carol-singers, wearing leather or cardboard masks, with sheep wool hair and moustache and comb or corn teeth. The wooden “goats”, covered with reed or folk carpets, are still used in the Bukovina villages today.
The groups of carol singers have always been accompanied by groups of musicians. The musical instruments that completed the folk holiday atmosphere were the violin, the bagpipe, the cembalo and the flute.
The museum’s flute collection is impressive, containing various types of flutes: from the smallest ones, with six holes, to the larger ones (measuring 80 to 90 centimeters), discreetly decorated with notches.
The eggs from the villages of this region and from the surrounding areas are the proof of a wide-spread custom. The collection consists of eggs painted with „chişiţă” (a decorating tool of different sizes), in China ink or water colour. Others are decorated with wax or leaves and painted with plant-colours. Some eggs are quite old, over sixty years and others have recently been painted (with natural or blown out content).The drawings depend on the taste and skill of each egg painter. There are simple flowers and main themes (lines, meanders, crosses, points), but there can also be complex patterns, at the pen-drawn eggs.
the graphic items signed by Verspasian Lungu, Hortensia Puia and Florin Niculescu and the collection of old icons dating back to the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The collection also includes beautiful icons painted on wood which came from Bukovina and Moldavia and the icons painted on glass from Ardeal. The one that stands out is the icon from the nineteenth century, brought from Jerusalem by a monk, Paisie Spiridon, which belonged to Alexandru Ioan Cuza.
of silver coins, bronze rings decorated with blue or red stones.
from Radauti houses a costume collection with over a thousand items, each with its own specific. The women's wrinkled neck and sleeve blouses have the greatest importance in the collection, dating back to the First World War's period and even to the second half of the nineteenth century. They are either embroidered or woven with red wool and metallic thread, or vividly coloured, their design resembling the nearby monastery's frescos. However, the twentieth century shirts present brighter colours, more patterns and a more complex design. The sheep skin coat and the sheep skin vests, which replace the traditional vests during winter time, are decorated with geometrical motifs associated with floral ones. The men's costume has much more discreet embroideries, the thick long coat, the fur cap and the belt representing a traditional folk element which has lived on in the memory of the elder and in the museum's collections.
