OLD MAPS MUSEUM BUCHAREST

BUCHAREST OLD MAPS MUSEUM

Bucharest maps museum full name is Bucharest maps and old books museum. It is an exhibition where you can see ancient maps of the world and old books and writings. There are also beautiful artefacts and layouts. Since we have been living in Bucharest for more than 24 years, we recomment this museum. It is on London Street 39. How to get to Bucharest maps museum? First of all, make sure you get to Victoria Square. From here, you can walk for about 15 minutes on Iancu de Hunedoara Boulevard. Then, turn left on Paris Street and, then, turn right on London Street. You can also get the bus, lines 331, 335, 301, 282 to Dorobanti Square. From here you will walk on Captain Demetriade Street to London Street.

Bucharest Old Maps Museum opened in 2003. It exhibits more than 900 maps and articles related to navigation and astronomy. The building also houses temporary exhibitions and events. It is the only museum of its kind open in Romania.

We visited the museum in the winter of 2018-2019, in January and it was a great experience. The first thing you see when you enter is a large hall with the first room. Here, on the left, there are many of the great pieces of the museum.
First of all, you will see a huge Earth-Globe. It was a gift from the President of France, Francois Mitterrand for the Romanian President Ion Iliescu.

EARTH AT MAPS MUSEUM BUCHAREST

The guide will surely tell you more about a second interesting piece of history exhibited at this museum. We are talking about a map of the moon. It is not a map designed with new technologies, but a map made in the 18th century. According to scholars, it is actually a detail of a more comprehensive work of J. G. Doppelmaier. He published his work called Tabula Selenographica at about 1740 in nowadays Germany. He continued the work of two great astronomers Johannes Hevelius from the 17th century and Battista Riccioli. They studied the surface of the Moon giving names to different areas of this planet.

MAP OF THE MOON

This is the moon map. Doppelmaier made it in Nuremberg at about 1740.

MERCATOR MAPS AT OLD MAPS MUSEUM BUCHAREST

People started to learn more about old maps after an interesting discovery. It was the Piri Rheis map of South America, Western Africa and Antarctica before becoming a land of ice. Everybody started to talk about an ancient civilization who traveled all around the world and made maps. That Piri Rheis’s strange map can be seen at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul . Later, Gerard Kremer, also known as Mercator used it in the 16th century. Mercator was a great scholar and he made a lot of maps. At least two of them are at the Old Maps Museum in Bucharest. One of them is about Europe.

MERCATOR EUROPE MAPS MUSEUM

This map of Europe was made by Gerardus Mercator in Amsterdam at about 1578. It is a copy of Ptolemy map from the 2nd century AD.

AMERICAS MAP AT MAPS MUSEUM

This is an old map where you can see the two Americas.

The same Mercator also traveled to Egypt and many other places. He made a lot of interesting maps, found ancient sources. Thus he designed new maps with territories which would have been lost otherwise. For instance, at Bucharest Old Maps and Books Museum you can see an ancient map of the Balkans. In it there is also Dacia, a land conquered by the Romans in 106 AD and where is Romania today.

DACIA MAP MERCATOR BUCHAREST

This is on old map of the Balkans printed in Amsterdam at about 1730. And it is about the history of this part of the world lived 2.000 years ago.

WHEN TO VISIT OLD MAPS MUSEUM BUCHAREST

Old Maps Museum in Bucharest is open from Wednesday to Sunday from 10 AM to 6 PM. Every first Saturday of the month you can visit it until 9 PM. According to the Romanian legislation, the museum is also closed on January 1, 2 and 24. You cannot visit it in the first and the second day at Easter time. And neither on May 1st, June 1st, August 15th, November 30th, December 25th and 26th for Christmas.

TIMETABLE OLD MAPS MUSEUM BUCHAREST

WHO FOUNDED OLD MAPS MUSEUM IN BUCHAREST?

It was the former Prime-Minister of Romania, Adrian Nastase who founded the Museum of Old Maps in 2003. He donated a great part of the exhibition, especially old maps. Thus the museum came into being and has got more than 900 maps. Other hundreds of old books are here. Many of them are in the warehouse due to the lack of space in the building. And a few words about the building: London Street is in an interesting area of Bucharest. Lots of members of the Romanian Communist Party had their own houses here.

A FORMER PRIME MINISTER AND THE MUSEUM

The building we are talking about belonged to a rich Armenian. He donated to Argentina and, thus, it housed for a long time the Consulate of this country in Bucharest. Anyway, coming back to the exhibition donated by the former Prime-minister Adrian Nastase, charged and imprisoned for corruption after 2010, many of the maps are related to geopolitical situations in history. This is one of the Nastase’s legacies it worth remembering. Like this war maps.

WAR MAPS BUCHAREST

FARES FOR OLD MAPS MUSEUM BUCHAREST

Adults will pay 20 RON for visiting the Museum, which almost 4 Euros, students will pay 5 RON and retired persons 10 RON. You are allowed to take pictures with no blitz camera, smartphone and so on for free. If you want to visit temporary exhibitions, you will have to pay from 10 to 25 RON. For French or English Guide you will also have to pay 150 RON, which is about 30 Euros.

Anyway, one of the most interesting things you will see in this museum is the ceilings. They were painted with astronomical, astrological and other symbols related to longitude, latitude and exploring adventures absolutely amazing and in a very short time, as our guide told us.

BUCHAREST PAINTING AT MAPS MUSEUM

There are also exhibited plans about Bucharest especially from the 20th century and also interesting paintings about the Romanian capital.

OLD MAPS MUSEUM CEILING

ROOF PAINTING

There are about 16 rooms in the museum and each one has got its own paintings on the ceilings with astronomical details about Earth and solar system.

WALL PAINTING

Some of the ceilings at Old Maps Museum Bucharest make you think about ancient astronomy and astrology as well.

If you need some more reasons to visit this museum when you travel to Bucharest, well, here you are. An ancient king who ruled the nowadays Romania in Antiquity, called Decebalus and who was defeated by the Roman Emperor Traian, as you can see at the NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM BUCHAREST, hid his treasure under a river. On o map exhibited here and made by Ortelius in 1595 at Anvers, you can read a short note about this story: it is about the river Sargetia where the Dacian King buried a lot of gold and silver. According to the Roman scholar Dio Cassius, the king changed the course of the river, put the treasure in the ground and, then let the river come back on its old course. The treasure has never been found.

SECRETS OF THE MAPS

Anyway, maps could have been made due to the discover of longitude and this happened, officially, in 1720. It was a conquest and the British Empire put 20,000 GBP for anyone who could build a watch to, exactly, count the time from the old continent to America in order to define longitude. That was in 1761 when it happened and the famous No.4 clock left England for Jamaica. It proved to be good and thus, after 1779 James Cook could make the maps of the Pacific Ocean and the continents with the right longitude. The sailors changed the history and here you can see two old ships as a tribute to them.

In 2021, The Old Maps and Books Museum Bucharest will be the host of The International Conferences on the History of Cartography.