Sibiu Museum of Natural History

There was a time when the Transylvanian naturalism, as well as the European one, experienced a spectacular grow and by that time the Transylvanian Society for Natural Sciences (Siebenbürghische Verein für Naturwissenschaften zu Hermannstadt) was established (1849) as the result of German-Saxon intellectuals’ initiative. They aimed for an organization fit to accommodate the sharing of their passion for the nature and to serve the dissemination of their discoveries in order to educate the younger generation in the spirit of knowledge about nature and of the preservation of natural trust.


One of the issues becoming more and more imperative in the late19th century was that of the available spaces for the collections storage, as their number increased. Around the year 1890, the plans for the construction of a building specially design in this porpoise were clearly contoured.


The construction started in the autumn of the year 1894, having the opening in the 12th of May, 1895. The building was built in an Italian High Renaissance architectural style, on three levels (basement, ground floor and one upper storey), being entirely renovated between 2006 and 2008. The courtyard is meant to be a means of relaxation for the visitors and also of seeing common and rare species of plants as trees and ornamental bushes.


The entire project of the permanent exhibition inaugurated in December 2007 is meant to take into a good account the extent patrimony from a scientific, chronological and esthetical perspective. As elements of novelty in the fashion of presentation, there are the tri-dimensional displaying through the means of dioramas and the sounding and illumination systems suggesting a night and day cycle in each described environment, all conferring to the exhibition a dynamic atmosphere, inducing the visitor an empathic approach to the condition of an explorer.


The collections of the museum comprise over 1 million exhibits (including mineralogy-petrography, paleontology, botany, entomology, malacology, the zoology of the vertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, as well as ichthyology, ornithology, and the zoology of mammals).


The main sections of the museum are The Live World, Ecosystems, Paleontology, Mineralogy. (From Brukenthal National Museum)