Kulturen i Lund

In 1882 Georg Karlin, together with a few helpers, founded a collection, which was taken over by the Cultural History Association for Southern Sweden. The association had been founded in the same year by the Historical and Archaeological Associations of the Scanian Landscapes and Lund's Landsmålsföreningar. During the first years, the association had museum-like activities in several different premises in Lund.

In 1890, the property now known as Herrehuset, with a large residential building, pond, garden and gazebo, was purchased. The house was given a new baroque façade and a number of other buildings were moved to the area. Four of these were to tell the story of the old parliamentary system divided into nobility, clergy, burghers and peasants. In 1892, Kulturen i Lund was inaugurated as Sweden's and the world's second open-air museum. The buildings displayed the collections organised according to different themes.

Over the next few years, the neighbouring properties were purchased. The city centre was built up in stages between 1907 and 1930. In the more than thirty cultural history buildings, exhibitions on cultural history, crafts, art and design are displayed.

Today, the museum's activities are based on large museum collections of both southern Swedish cultural history material and world culture.

Kulturen employs a broad definition of cultural heritage that includes both the tangible and intangible.

Herrehuset was built around 1816 as a residential house and is located in the center of Lund, Sweden. It features medieval bricks and natural stone on the ground floor. In 1890, the cultural heritage organization Kulturen purchased the property, 35C, where Herrehuset stands, and opened a permanent museum in 1892. The baroque facade, not original to the house, was added in 1892. The building’s history began when Per Henrik Ling, a prominent figure in Swedish gymnastics, bought the land in 1807 and planned to build a large stone house using bricks from demolished chapels. He sold parts of the land and left Lund in 1813 before completing the house. Professor Jonas Albin Engeström bought and completed the house in 1818. After changing hands several times, Kulturen acquired the property in 1890 and transformed it into a museum. The building was fully renovated between 2012 and 2014 and now houses the exhibition "The World at Kulturen."

As part of the collections, we hold around 200 objects collected from survivors from the Ravensbrück concentration camp upon their arrival in Sweden with the Red Cross’s White Buses operation in 1945. Although most of these objects were owned by ‘political’ prisoners, the collection has since grown to include Holocaust-related archival material, for instance letters belonging to Jewish children who arrived in Sweden during the Kindertransport initiative in 1939, as well as photo albums and letters donated to the museum by the manager of the housing facilities set up for survivors in southern Sweden after the war.

The museum also conducted several interviews in the mid 1990s with survivors who had remained in Sweden after the war, and these interviews were recorded in the archive.