National Museum of Maps and Old Books, Bucharest

The fascination of old maps

Where? When? How much does it cost?

The National Museum of Maps and Old Books, the Museum of Maps for short, is located in Bucharest, sector 1, str. Londra 39, postal code 011762.

If you are coming on your own, you can park on the street in the free parking spaces where allowed. You can also take the M1 and M2 metro to the Victoriei Square station or other public transportation.

It is open from Wednesday to Sunday from 10-18.

Free admission on the last Wednesday of every month.

About the museum

This museum has been in existence since 2003. The museum building was built in 1920 and is a villa with Gothic architectural elements. Most of the exhibits were donated by former Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase and his wife Dana.

Over 1,000 maps and books are on display throughout the museum.

1. Museum

I visited this museum with my daughter, Denisa (12), and I enjoyed how much the maps fascinated her and how she was reading information or asking me questions about what she saw.

Map Museum

2. Ground Floor - Great Geographers

In the room on the left, on the ground floor, we meet great geographers, from the ancient Ptolemy of the sec. II, to the more modern Mercator, Ortelius and Muenster of the sec. XVI, and some of their maps.

Also here is a globe donated by Francois Mitterand to Ion Iliescu and then to the museum.

The earliest map is by Fries (1525) and depicts central Europe, including Transylvania and Wallachia.

Mercator

Transylvania

Ortelius

The Black Sea

Donate

Globe

Fries map of Central Europe

3. Inside

The ceilings were also decorated with maps or images from mythology when the museum opened.

In the hallway, a few models of ships catch the eye.

Through the downstairs hallway to the room at the far end, where there is a temporary exhibition: French Itinerary

The stained-glass windows are another of the building's attractions, with heraldic and cartographic representations.

We climb the stairs to the 1st floor. On the first floor we feast our eyes with a marble statue and paintings on Romanian themes.

Decorated ceiling

Model ship

French itinerary

Stained glass

Statues

Tablou

4. 1st floor - Territories inhabited by Romanians

Many of the maps on the first floor refer to the territories inhabited by us Romanians and our ancestors. Maps of the Greater Romania are not missing.

Bucharest, aka Little Paris, has a dedicated space.

We also learn what a sextant is. It's an optical instrument for measuring latitude and longitude. But also a telescope. It is also an optical instrument that makes it possible to observe celestial bodies thanks to a system of mirrors.

On display are several busts of personalities: Dimitrie Cantemir, voivode of Moldavia, who realized in 1714 the first map of Moldavia, Nicolaus Copernicus, Prussian astronomer, who launched the theory of the Earth's rotation around the Sun.

The territories inhabited by Romanians are presented one by one.

There are also some decorated stoves in the hallway on the first floor.

Greater Romania

Bucharest

sextant

Telescop

Dimitrie Cantemir

Nicolaus Copernicus

Principality of Monaco

Valahia

Transylvania

Soba

soba

5. 1st floor - Other parts of the world

We move on to other parts of the world. We find information about the whole globe. Maps dominate by far all the rooms you visit.

We go up another level to the 2nd floor. Here we see:
The course of the Danube on the map, which is a good gateway to many other maps of all corners of the world and many other areas on Planet Earth.

An interesting surprise was the Moon Map. Other astronomical information got Denise curious.

Finally we meet Vasco da Gamma and Magelan, the great Portuguese navigators. DaGamma was the first to circumnavigate Africa, identifying a maritime trade route between Europe and Asia, while Magelan made the first round-the-world sea voyage by a European ship.

Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci are not missing either.