Folk Life Museum: 20 museums and 1 zoo in Graz and Styria

Folk Life Museum

at the Paulustor

Today: 10:00 - 18:00

Folk Life Museum The new Folk Life Museum at the Paulustor in Graz tells of different lifestyles, social and cultural change and how changes in everyday life shape and move us.

1913

Since 1913, the Folk Life Museum has been collecting, preserving and interpreting material evidence of social life and human destiny.

20.000

The collections of the Folk Life Museum include a comprehensive folklore library with around 15,000 individual volumes as well as 80 current specialist journals, periodicals and publication series, a connected archive with rich source material on Styrian folk culture as well as a diverse picture archive with around 20,000 colour slides as well as many historical photographs.

2022

Since November 2022, a modified "Trachtensaal" has been open to visitors again. Currently, its history, contents and interpretations, garments and figurines are being re-explored and contextualised by the museum.

Exhibition

'They Want to Take Our Lives'

Bombing Minorities 1993–1996

The ‘Minorities Initiative’ exhibition recalls the right-wing extremist terror and fear that Austria’s minorities were subjected to between 1993 and 1996. The show commemorates the victims, lets those affected have their say, and sheds light on the role played by the political and social climate of the 1990s in these acts of violence.

Duration: 14.05.-26.10.2025
Opening: 13.05.2025 6pm

Image Credits

Participation

Age(ing) and Living

A participatory museum project

One collection focal point of the Folk Life Museum is that of ‘living’.

Not only does the smoking room bear witness to historical living practices, but countless objects from the collection also show the habits of different people and generations regarding how they lived.

The Folk Life Museum aims to use various workshops and events to explore how living, especially in old age, is changing. The goal of this participatory project is to invite people, institutions and cooperation partners to research these topics together with a team from the Folk Life Museum, and then to devise an exhibition based on the findings.

Duration: 07.03.-08.12.2025