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Southwest of the centre along Calea Dumbravii (trolley bus #T1 from the train station), near the Zoological Gardens in the Dumbrava forest, is the excellent Museum of Traditional Folk Civilization (May to mid-Oct Mon-Fri 10am-7pm, Sat & Sun 10am-8pm), one of the best open-air museums in Romania. The emphasis is on folk technology, with windmills and watermills from all over the country rebuilt here in working order. Under the Ceausescu regime the museum faced constant political obstruction as it struggled to keep alive a pride in rural traditions when the government wanted to make country life indistinguishable from urban life - one village church actually had to be dismantled and buried for two years until it was permissible to re-erect it here. Bus #8, from the bridge south of the train station or Bulevardul Coposu, takes you to TURNISOR , where it will drop you outside the Pfarrhaus at Str. Bielz 62 ( Kirchgasse ). To Romanians, Turnisor is simply a suburb of Sibiu, but to its German populace it's a distinct village, Neppendorf. Originally Saxon, its population was boosted in the eighteenth century by an infusion of Austrian Protestants, expelled by their Catholic neighbours; these Landlers were traditionally less dour than the somewhat stolid Saxons. Although the two groups never mixed in other villages throughout the region, here the Saxons and Landler intermarried - yet they are still seated separately in the church, with Landler women on one side of the nave and Saxon women on the other. The church was never fortified - the villagers fled to Sibiu when the Turks came to burn their village in 1493 - but the interior is typical of Saxon village churches, with lovely paintings on the gallery, and one Turkish rug; ask at the Pfarrhaus for the key. There's also a brilliant museum in the north transept, mapping the history of the village, with lots of old photos and plenty of text (all in German). Today there are only about 200 Germans in Turnisor, compared to about 4000 before World War II.
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