Mondseer Rauchhaus, Mondsee

The Mondseeland Farmers' Museum and the Mondseer Rauchhaus Open Air Museum form two related museums in Mondsee in Upper Austria. On display are agricultural work, equipment and buildings.

The Mondseeland Farmers' Museum was built in 2007/2008 as an interpretation of a modern agricultural outbuilding and serves as an informative entrance for the Mondseer Rauchhaus open-air museum with its buildings and the open-air grounds. The permanent exhibition on the first floor uses original equipment as well as texts, film footage and audio stations to show agricultural work in Mondseeland over the course of the four seasons.

The topics such as agriculture, grassland management, forestry are divided into: Prehistory over 6000 years of agriculture in the Mondseeland, pre-industrial period, which because of the world wars and the economic crises reaches up to the 1950s, the subsequent rapid structural change up to the present.

The open-air museum Mondseer Rauchhaus shows the once common farmstead form of the smoke house with the associated outbuildings in the Mondseeland. The Mittertennhof, built in wooden block construction, united a dwelling house, stable and barn under one roof and is furnished with associated household goods and equipment. The peculiarity of this type of house is the absence of a flue. The smoke freely escapes through the roof and dries the grain stored on the upper floor. This is the Lower Bischofer in Innerschwand, first mentioned in a document in 1416. It had to be demolished in 1958 when the West Autobahn was built, and at the time it was one of the last intact smoke houses in Mondseeland - in 1917 there were still 200 smoke houses in Mondseeland.

The outdoor area includes: Zuhaus, chapel, flax dryer, Mondsee dugouts, hut with built-in grain bin, mill, circular trail with old fruit tree varieties.

With the Fellnerhaus, as an example of a rebuilt and thus modernized smoke house, another exhibit is to be added.

The Farmers' Museum is run by the newly founded Farmers' Museum Association. The open-air museum Mondseer Rauchhaus is run by the association Heimatbund Mondsee, founded in 1949, and is the oldest open-air museum in Upper Austria.