Location: Lyngby Map
Tel. 33 13 44 11
Open: Apr- Oct 10am- 5pm Tue- Sun
Frilandsmuseet is an open air museum situated in the Lyngby on the northern outskirts of Danish capital of Copenhagen. Frilandsmuseet covers an area of over 40 hectares. Over 100 buildings from different social strata were brought here from various villages of Denmark and date back to the 17th century. The museum admission is free of charge. You can get here from Copenhagen using a number 184 or 194 bus from Nørreport Station or by S train to Sorgenfri station. Many volunteers including blacksmiths, bricklayers, carpenters and many others come to Frilandsmuseet and show traditional Danish crafts that were common in the rural area.
In 1896, the founder and leader of the
Danish Folk Museum, Bernhard Olsen, purchased a farm from Halland
and an attic shed from Småland, which was set up in a corner of
Kongens Have. The plan to create a building museum on this site
failed, so they started looking for a new site, and on June 24,
1901, the Open Air Museum was opened at its current address at
Fuglevad Windmill.
Since then, a large number of buildings
have been added.
Buildings from all over the country
The
museum houses farm buildings from different parts of Denmark, the
Faroe Islands and the former Danish parts of Skåne, Halland and
South Schleswig (in addition to the Småland buildings, which were to
illustrate different types of buildings that had disappeared). The
buildings are decorated as when they were inhabited by farmers,
country craftsmen or the people of the estate and show the Danes'
daily life through history with alcoves, tools, clogs and ornaments.
It gives a nuanced picture of the Danes' everyday life in the period
1650-1940. Animals of old Danish breeds graze in the fields: lambs,
goats, geese, ducks, horses and cows.
Gardens and working
workshops
The museum has 25 historic gardens with flowers, fruit
trees and useful plants that show the customs and usage of different
times.
In the classic farmhouse, the neat and the useful are
combined. The garden's plants and flowers were used for dyeing,
medicine or spice, and the garden was divided into several sections,
each with its own function: orchard, cabbage farm, herb garden and
firewood garden.
In the romantic farmhouse there were green
gazebos of linden or beech, and the fruit trees stood in the lawn of
the ornamental garden, while the beds were used for potatoes or
vegetables instead of flowers.
The manor park originates from
the clunky era with the love for the overloaded and foreign. The
garden contains a park-like ornamental garden with exotic flowers
and trees and a large kitchen garden with vegetables, flowers and
fruit for both lords and servants.
The museum is recreating a
station town from the childhood of industrialization, which shows a
machine shop, a smithy and a station. Brugsen sells the goods of the
time with everything from spirits, sewing accessories, toys,
hardware and trinkets to groceries and coarser agricultural goods.
During special periods, several of the houses are inhabited by
employees who communicate via living history. This takes place
primarily during the schools' summer holidays.
Among
the museum's buildings are three wind turbines. An older mill is a
stump mill from Karlstrup (Karlstrup Mill), built around 1662,
renewed in 1763 and moved to the Open Air Museum in 1921. The mill
has two "floors" and can be turned by one man, who pulls in the
"back stairs". The stump mill can be seen from Kongevejen. The mill
can run and it is possible to get into it on certain days.
A
newer windmill is the Fuglevad windmill - a gallery Dutchman built
on the site in 1832. The third is a small windmill in connection
with a farm from Læsø.
The open-air museum also has several
watermills: a submersible mill with half-timbering from Pedersker on
Bornholm, a skvat mill from Sandø in the Faroe Islands and one from
Småland and finally Møllergården from Ellested on Funen. The mills
are cared for by Frilandsmuseets Møllerlaug.
During the
season, there are, among other things, theater performances, garden
trips, old games and sales from the use in the station town. In the
summer and autumn of 2018, the new initiative "Frøsnapperfestival"
was launched in the museum's station town, which for the occasion
temporarily changed its name to "Frøsnapperbyen". It became such a
huge audience success that it was repeated in the summer of 2019 and
was complemented by another new festival called "Bonderøvsfestival".
During the autumn holidays 2019, the museum also arranged a
"Halloween festival" as a replacement for the previous autumn
markets ".