The smallest but one of the best skanzens (open-air museums of folk architecture) in the country is housed in the Open-Air Ethnographical Collection. The museum is located in Szenna, a 9km bus ride southwest of Kaposvár (250Ft, 20 minutes, up to a dozen daily). What makes it unique is that its centrepiece, the large 18th-century Calvinist church (1815), with its ‘crowned’ pulpit, coffered and painted ceiling, loft and pews, still functions as a house of worship for villagers.
Half a dozen porták (farmhouses with outbuildings) from central Somogy County and the Zselic region surround the ‘folk baroque’ church – as they would in a real village – and the caretaker will point out the most interesting details: the ‘smoke’ kitchens with stable doors; the woven-wall construction of the stables and barns; lumps of sugar suspended from the ceiling to soothe irritable children (bread soaked in the Hungarian fruit brandy pálinka was given to the particularly pesky); a coop atop the pigsty to keep the chickens warm in winter; and ingenious wooden locks ‘so secure that even God couldn’t get in’.
