The Director of the Ethnographic Museum, Marko Krstić, recalled that throughout its 125 years of existence, the institution has been a place of encounter and gathering, as well as a place for preserving tangible and intangible cultural heritage.
Speaking about the new exhibition, Krstić expressed his particular appreciation to the curatorial and professional team involved in its preparation, emphasizing that wedding customs are presented from multiple perspectives through objects, photographs, testimonies, and contemporary technologies.
He pointed out that weddings as a custom transcend local boundaries and are present in different cultures around the world. Alongside the museum material, visitors are also given the opportunity to explore certain elements of wedding customs through VR technology and gain insight into what weddings looked like in the past.
“The history of this institution has also been shaped by generations of curators, ethnologists, and researchers who, for more than a century, have collected, studied, and preserved testimonies of the life, customs, beliefs, and culture of the people,” said the Director of the Ethnographic Museum, emphasizing that the museum’s collections today hold more than 120,000 museum objects, including more than 53,000 ethnographic objects.
These collections represent valuable testimony to different aspects of the life and culture of the communities whose heritage the Museum preserves and presents to the public.
The exhibition’s curator, Tijana Čolak-Antić Popović, explained that her aim was to present different wedding customs from across Serbia during a period when the country was entering a process of modernization and certain traditional forms of life were gradually changing and disappearing.
She particularly highlighted changes in the appearance of the bride and the significance of traditional clothing.
The exhibition takes visitors through different stages of the wedding ritual, from the proposal and wedding preparations, through the bride’s departure from her family home and the wedding ceremony itself, to her arrival at her new home. Customs from the Pirot region, Kosovo and Metohija, Šumadija, and Vojvodina are presented, highlighting the richness and diversity of traditional wedding practices.
In addition to original museum objects and photographs, the exhibition also features interactive elements that allow visitors to explore wedding customs and the everyday life of past communities in a different way.
The exhibition’s curator invited members of the public to contribute to its further enrichment by bringing old wedding photographs from their family albums to the Ethnographic Museum. The photographs will be scanned and, with the owners’ consent, displayed on screens in the Museum, incorporating the personal memories and family histories of members of the public into the exhibition.
Guests at the celebration were symbolically adorned with sprigs of rosemary at the entrance, a plant traditionally associated with wedding customs. The anniversary celebration was complemented by a cultural and artistic programme and a theatrical performance.
The celebration of 125 years of the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade is also an opportunity to highlight the importance of the continuous work of collecting, preserving, studying, and presenting cultural heritage, as well as the role of museums in connecting different generations with the heritage passed down to them by those who came before.
