“Peaceful countryside, joyful countryside…” one feels like saying when visiting the Kujawy–Dobrzyń Ethnographic Park. In Kłóbka, a picturesque Kuyavian village, a former traditional rural settlement has been faithfully recreated. Old cottages with flower gardens full of blooming hollyhocks, sunflowers, and phlox; the scent of herbs in the air and the buzzing of bees from straw beehives… It is a place where time seems to have stood still.

Here you will find old craft workshops – a blacksmith’s forge, a pottery workshop, and an oil mill – as well as a post mill. You can visit an old inn, a fire station, and a wooden church. In the former school building, you will see the headmaster’s office, the teacher’s apartment, and a classroom where, kneeling on dried peas, you can experience a traditional punishment once given to unruly pupils. An exhibition in the historic manor granary introduces issues related to the economy and agriculture of the old countryside.

 

In the open-air museum park, by the Lubieńka River, you will find a 19th-century manor house belonging to the Orpiszewski family, whose interiors faithfully recreate the atmosphere of a former landed gentry residence. It was here that Maria Wodzińska Orpiszewska lived – the youthful love of Frédéric Chopin.