EN
Wandering nowadays across Poland and Europe, one can easily notice that in many respects the contemporary pictures of our reality are very much alike — adjusted to present needs and tasks. Only here and there in a given space has an object remained to remind one of e.g. the forms and character of traditional architecture or other elements of the past cultural landscape. A huge part of the latter, however, has been destroyed or rebuilt, with ancient customs being forgotten and beliefs becoming more rational. Some of them merely have been preserved for the next generations by family circles, village communities, collectors and documentalists. The countryside in contemporary Poland is completely different from rural areas of the past, and it is still changing dynamically. In a few, or a dozen or so years time it will turn out different again and today’s countryside will itself become a historical image of transformations. Protection of the cultural heritage of the countryside has been entrusted e.g. to the museums located in appropriate constructions and to open-space museums. According to the Act on Museums, these two kinds of institutions are expected to “collect and constantly protect the natural and cultural properties of material and immaterial heritage of humankind, inform about the values and contents of deposited collections, disseminate basic values of Polish history, science and culture as well as […], form cognitive and aesthetic sensitivity and enable to use the aggregated collection”. Nowadays, in Poland there are functioning eleven registered ethnographic museums and also more than a dozen others as well as 46 registered open-space museums and a dozen or so regional ones. &e open-air museums can be divided depending on their ways of presentation and on their kinds of collected historic artefacts into: ethnographic parks, village museums reconstructing the traditional arrangements of old villages, museums of traditional architecture, industrial and technical open-air museums and in situ (on the spot) ethnographic expositions, where definite objects from the past, such as e.g. windmills, watermills, rural dwellings and other constructions are presented in their original location. All of the above mentioned institutions protect the heritage of the Polish countryside, referring in their collections first of all to the heritage of individual micro- and macroregions. Hence, all indications of rural community activities (i.e. settlement forms, buildings, natural landscapes, garden, parks as well as all kinds of signs of spiritual culture including beliefs, customs, ceremonies and various signs of everyday life) are subjected to protection there. They guard the “world” which could have been seen in situ not such a long time ago, but which today has almost completely disappeared from our landscape and cultural space. Taking care of its existence, we preserve for the memory of next generations the reality which, during the partition of Poland (1772–1918) and in the Second Polish Republic times (1918–1939), constituted the everyday life of our grand- and great-grandfathers. In order to preserve this call from the past, society must be aware of the legal and intentional need to protect this heritage for posterity.