Museum of Shapes – Reconversion of a tourist information point

Since 2018 we started to focus on the Bălănesei Valley, which is one of the access gates to Buzău Land. Beyond crossing picturesque areas with attractive objectives for visitors (concretions, rock-hewn dwellings, a prehistoric delta, glacial landscape, Teutonic ruins), Valea Bălănesei provides the connection with Valea Slănicului and the Colți area.

Thus, we set out to focus our efforts on the development of this valley. We applied our recipe, which consists of the involvement of community members, promoting the area, managing visitors and attractive areas, but also creating new attractions. One of these attractions, of which we are very proud, is the Museum of Shapes that we inaugurated in August 2018.

The Museum of Shapes is an original space in Romania. After crossing its threshold, you will be able to speak directly with the concretions who will tell you their story. You will be sent on a journey of millions of years in the past, and you will go through several stages of the earth's history to discover how the Ulmet concretions came to "grow". You will learn about the prehistoric delta, about the retreat of the sea and the rise of the Carpathians, about how groundwater leads to the formation of concretions, you will discover how they reached to the surface, but also what people thought about concretions over time. Moreover, you will find out what the concretions think about people :)

As a bonus, you will see pictures of concretions from Mars and get your hands on a volcanic ash concretions!

The space is an interactive and narrative one, which uses Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality is the technology that helps us interact with concretions and make them "talk", using tablets or phones as an intermediary. On this occasion, our team created the augmented reality software "museumAR" that we will further develop, so that we can use this technology as creatively and diverse as possible in the future.

The Museum of Shapes was created together with volunteers from inside and outside the community according to an original concept of the Buzău Land team. It is the result of a beautiful collaboration with the Bozioru Commune City Hall and with the locals. Beyond being an original space, it is also an example of what we can achieve in an old tourist information point, which only offered visitors leaflets. Now, it has a million-year story to offer. The Museum of Shapes is a strategic point, being located between the site with concretions from Ulmet, now a protected area, and Poiana Coziancei with the rock-hewn dwellings. The next step is to arrange some routes in the area and Colți-Bozioru will be able to offer a mini vacation package.