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NEWS: Take part in the Carpathians Challenge! →

The Carpathian Mountains – second largest in Europe after the Alps – span across Southeast Poland, Southwest Ukraine, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Romania. There is a diverse and rich tradition of folklore, regional crafts and arts, and folk culture within the Carpathian area. We are interested in looking at its cross-border similarities, common history and cultural roots. The goal of the project is to collect bibliography, source material, photo and audiovisual material on authentic folklore of the region, make it available on Wikimedia Commons – and use it for better coverage of related articles on Wikipedia (in English and relevant local languages). The main focus is on regional costume, regional museums, folk arts and crafts and local vernacular architecture.

Teams consisting of Wikipedians, ethnographers from the National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw, and international volunteers will travel to several Central European destinations in order to document folk culture in Wikipedias and Wikimedia Commons. All team members will also write, expand and illustrate a predefined set of related articles on related language versions of Wikipedia. See the lists of articles.

Wikipedians from the team establish contacts with Wikipedians from all the countries visited, inform them about the project in advance, and get them involved in editing, as well as in local training workshops and documentation trips. Each trip will be linked to at least one museum of ethnography in the visited region, with whom the team will collaborate on the project (see list of museums below). We will also conduct a basic wikiworkshop for local residents and staff in one museum in each country.

Museums and collections

Aprons at the Maramures Regional Museum in Baia Mare

Getting museums onto Wikipedia

The team visits Carpathian regions in 5 countries – and in each region aims to visit and document as many regional museums as possible. In 2016, we visited 10 museums and open-air museums; we wrote new articles about many of them (and are writing others); we took photographs of selected items from their collections, uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons and illustrated related articles. We hope the project will fill in a gap in the coverage of smaller regional museums in Wikipedias of the Carpathian region, and in English.

Some of the new Wikipedia articles about regional museums you can now read include: The Tatra Museum in Zakopane, Museum of Zakopane Style at Villa Koliba, Wallachian Open Air Museum (in English, Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovakian); Zagroda Korkoszów w Czarnej Górze, Zagroda Sołtysów w Jurgowie and Muzeum Etnografii i Sztuki Ludowej w Baia Mare (in Polish).

See the full list of museum-related articles in progress, propose a new topic, translate an article!

The White Room, Korkosz Croft in Czarna Góra
Ethnographic archives, The Tatra Museum in Zakopane
Maramures Village Museum

Thematic collaboration

Apart from writing articles on museums previously absent from Wikipedia, we collaborate with several museums across the region. In some museums the objects, items and exhibitions have been photographed by project participants and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. In other cases, we were able to work together to identify elements from the collections which then have been donated to Wikimedia Commons especially for this project, to illustrate the historical or artistic background of Carpathian culture.

Images taken at the Tatra Museum in Zakopane
Images taken at the Wallachian Open Air Museum
Images contributed by the National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw
Images contributed by the National Museum in Warsaw
Images contributed by the Slovak National Gallery

People

Articles written in the project will highlight lesser-known internationally, but well documented regional artists – or widely established ones with an interest in folklore; craftspeople and makers of unique objects known in subject literature; historical figures not known widely in the international context and other people related to the culture and traditions of the Carpathian Highlands.

Some of the new articles about traditional artists, craftsmen and poets include biograms of Jan Krzeptowski Sabała, Stanisław Witkiewicz, Stan Ioan Pătraș (English, Slovakian, Polish); Józef Hulka (Polish), and others.
Other topics of interest include expanding articles on local ethnic groups like Gorals, Hutsuls, Boykos or Rusyns. We also write about general subjects related to rural life in the Carpathian Highlands: transhumance, redyk, wypas, wypas kulturowy.

Folk costume

One of the main themes of the project is folk costume across the Carpathians. The participants have written articles on general subjects such as costumes of Gorals from Podhale and Żywiec, Romanian folk dress, Ukrainian Vyshyvanka, as well as about specific items such as kierpce, cucha, or designs such as the parzenica.