The Hațegan Village Museum

The owner of this renown collection is called Anton Socaci, known amongst the volunteers at Geoparc as "nenea Antonică". For years and years, he has been gathering certain objects that locals did not need or deemed not useful. Today, the old house, which would have collapsed if not for Anton Socaci, is a small jewel to its village appearing in tourist guides as "The Hațegan Village Museum"

School and soccer in a Romanian amphitheatre
The house, which is 120 years old, belonged to rather wealthy people. Other houses had straw roofs or living in huts, but this one, however, had a tile roof from the very beginning. Initially, Anton Socaci wanted to transform it into a holiday house, but after collecting so many old and precious things he decided to make it a museum instead.

He graduated a military technic school, but, eager to learn ethnography, he studied 4 years at Bucharest through a project organised by The Romanian Peasant Museum. He learned how to conserve materials, how to organise an exhibition and later practised at museums in Bucharest and the "Astra" Museum in Sibiu.

Sursa foto https://www.facebook.com/Muzeul-Satului-Hategan

From prehistoric weapons to very old letters and bank-notes
Tourists that decide to go to Peşteana should know that the museum is made of 3 rooms in which Anton Socaci gathered different utensils, household items and agricultural machinery. Some of these items include: cooking pots, pitchers, a loom, goat and wolf skins used for decor, weapons, coins, harpoons, iron used to mark animals, traditional costumes, lamps from Austria and a Russian Petromax lamp along with prehistorical weapons which were carved by humans to hunt animals at small distances.

The roman sarcophagus, a carnivorous plant and the Bottomless Lake
One of the most interesting objects brought to the museum is the Roman sarcophagus. Anton Socaci says that it was destined to a Roman entity and that during the 1900s it belonged to the village's mayor. All in all, Peșteana awaits us not only to explore its museum but also visit the carnivorous plant as well as the Bottomless Lake which are just as amazing as everything the Hațeg area has to offer!