The Carpathian Troy

This app is your guide through The Open-Air Archaeological Museum at Trzcinica

Application ‘Carpathian Troy’ enables you to travel in time to distant past – to one of the oldest strongholds of the Bronze Age in Poland and to one of the largest Slavic settlements of Early Medieval period.

The Open-Air Archaeological Museum at Trzcinica is a Branch of the Sub-Carpathian Museum at Krosno. It’s a place where the past, hundreds or even thousands of years away, has left the museum display cabinets and come up close to visitors, in fact so close that you can actually touch it. Here you’ll see how people who had never heard of computers or atoms once lived, in harmony with Nature. That’s what helped them accomplish magnificent achievements. At Trzcinica we discovered one of the earliest and mightiest defensive settlements in Poland, dating back to the Early Bronze Age over 4,000 years ago. The stronghold belonged to a great civilisation, the Otomani-Füzesabony Culture, which flourished over 3,600 years ago. Later Trzcinica was the site of a monumental Slavonic early medieval hillfort (8th c. AD). The Early Bronze Age settlement here flourished at the time when ancient Troy and Mycenae were developing, the ziggurats were being built in Mesopotamia, and the pyramids were being erected in Egypt. This place was a cultural centre of paramount importance in the Early Bronze Age. Much later, in the Early Middle Ages, it was the headquarters of a tribal prince. It owes its name, “the Carpathian Troy,” to its special historic and cultural legacy, its links with the Anatolian-Balkan Civilisation, and the fact that it is made up of layer upon layer of ancient settlements.

The Carpathian Troy Open-Air Archaeological Museum covers an area of 8 hectares. On the premises there is a 150 m stretch of reconstructed earthwork defences, there are 18 reconstructed cottages, a smithy, and 2 gatehouses leading into the stronghold. Apart from a unique journey into the past, the Carpathian Troy also offers you a state-of-the-art display. Alongside the traditional open-air show we have a fully up-to-date exhibition pavilion with educational facilities for a broad range of ages of young visitors. We also have a multi-purpose conference hall for scientific meetings, film shows, or even concerts. But the star of the show in the exhibition pavilion is the display itself. The film and the display bring you into the subjects presented in the open-air exhibition, where there is no place at all for modern gadgetry, where you will come up face-to-face with the realities of ancient times.

Our aim was to endow the past with a new quality, making it absolutely tangible for the 21st-century observer. We want to make the silent archaeological artefacts laid out in museum cabinets come to life and speak up to visitors in a way people of our own times will understand. Welcome on a tour of the Troy of the Carpathians, an extraordinary place presenting as true-to-life an insight as possible into the times of people of the Early Bronze Age and of the Early Middle Ages, an open-air display unique and in a class of its own in Poland and in this part of Europe.

This app will be a perfect guide through the paths of our Open-Air Museum. It will lead you through the Archaeological Park with its reconstructed villages, the Stronghold and the Viewing tower. We wish you a good day!