A hundred and sixty buildings moved here from across Norway, including a stave church from about 1200.
Founded in 1894, this is one of the oldest open-air museums in the world and the largest in Norway: around 160 buildings, taken down where they stood across the country and rebuilt here.
The Gol stave church
The centrepiece, and the reason to come.
Stave churches are timber-framed medieval churches built with corner posts — stav — rather than horizontal logs. Norway had perhaps a thousand of them. Twenty-eight survive.
The Gol church was built around 1200 in Hallingdal. By the 1880s it was derelict and about to be replaced. King Oscar II bought it, had it dismantled and re-erected here, and it became the founding object of what was then his own private collection of historic buildings.
It is dark, tarred, steep-roofed and covered in dragon-head finials, and the inside is smaller than you expect and smells of pitch. Standing in it is the closest you will get in Oslo to a medieval Norwegian interior.
Purists point out — correctly — that it was heavily restored in the nineteenth century in line with what people then thought a stave church should look like. That is worth knowing and does not spoil it.
The rest of the open-air museum
The buildings are grouped by region and by period: farmsteads from Setesdal, Telemark and Hallingdal, storehouses on stilts, a whole 1865 Oslo tenement yard, a village shop, a petrol station, and a 1950s apartment.
The tenement building is unexpectedly the best thing after the church. Individual flats are furnished as they were in different decades from the 1870s to the 2000s, including one presented as the home of a Pakistani immigrant family in 2002 — which is a considered choice about what “Norwegian cultural history” means, and it is placed in the same building as the 1879 rooms rather than off in a separate gallery.
Indoors
Folk art — rosemaling, carved and painted furniture, and one of the great collections of it.
Folk costume — the bunad, worn nationwide on 17 May, with the regional variations laid out.
Sámi culture — a substantial permanent exhibition, developed with Sámi institutions, covering the reindeer economy, the joik, and the long official policy of Norwegianisation that the state formally apologised for. It does not soften that history.
Practical
Charged; under-18s free.
Summer — buildings open, staff in costume, animals, demonstrations, the stave church accessible. Winter — much reduced, most buildings locked, and the site is a large cold park with a Christmas market in December.
Bus 30 all year, or the ferry from the City Hall pier in summer, which takes ten minutes and is far nicer.
The site is large and hilly and involves a lot of walking on gravel.
The neighbouring Fram Museum and the Kon-Tiki are a fifteen-minute walk further out on the same peninsula, and doing two of the three in a day is sensible. Doing all three plus the beaches is a long day.
More Museums
The Munch Museum
Thirteen floors of a leaning tower that Oslo voted against, holding almost everything Munch owned when he died.
The National Museum
The largest art museum in the Nordic countries, opened in 2022, holding the version of The Scream you know.
The Viking Ship Museum
Closed. The best-preserved Viking ships in the world are behind hoardings until the new museum opens.