Gala Museum near Baku

Absheron History In the Open Air

Forty kilometers from Baku there is Gala, the well-known open-air historical and ethnographic museum. The museum, founded in 2008 at an archaeological site located in the same-name village, is dedicated to the history of the Absheron Peninsula. There, you can see how the Azerbaijani lived, what they ate and drank and how they managed a household over the period from the XVI to XIX centuries.

The territory of 1.2 ha hosts old-time houses – portable tents made of animal skins, subsequently replaced by stone and beaten cobworks with cupolas, an ancient blacksmith shop, market, pottery, bakery, threshing mill and other interesting medieval buildings. You can see, touch, and take picture of all of them. You can even try to bake bread in a common oven, weave a carpet, muddy in pottery or feed camels, horses and donkeys, peacefully resting in their stalls.

Many monuments and exhibits were brought to the Gala Museum from different corners of the Absheron Peninsula; they were renovated or fully reconstructed. All together, they help to get an idea of the life of the medieval people in Azerbaijan.

It is interesting to know that scientists have found the evidence showing that the first settlements on the site of Gala village appeared much earlier, at least 5,000 years ago rather than in the Middle Ages. Rare exhibits of antiquity as well as cave paintings of primitive people with pictures of hunting and ritual sacrifice, also found their place in the richest museum exposition. The Gala Museum territory hosts also several exhibitions, where the tourists can see ancient household items, glassware, jewelry and other interesting exhibits cased in glass.

A guide, whom is best to hire in the museum, will help you not to get lost in the maze of the history of the Apsheron Peninsula.