The Krkonose Museum in Jilemnice

The Krkonose Museum was founded in 1891 following the initial preparatory work for the 1895 Prague Czech-Slavic Ethnographic Exhibition. Its first exhibition was installed in the former girls’ school at the end of the century. The museum changed site several times after that, and since 1953 has used the former palace of the Counts of Harrach. It has been operated by the Krkonossky National Park Administration since 1979, and since 2013 has been run jointly with the Town of Jilemnice.

The exhibitions focus on the history of the Western Krkonose, Czech skiing until 1938, the life of Count Jan Nepomuk of Harrach, and the work of Frantisek Kavan, an important Czech landscape painter. The museum also offers a variety of short-term exhibitions, accompanying events and lectures. The exhibition on local history and ethnography presents, besides others, a unique mechanical nativity scene by Jachym Metelka, made in 1883–1913. The original mechanism actuates 142 figurines with 350 different movements, all accompanied by sounds.