The Finnish Labour Museum Werstas, Tampere, Finland

The Finnish Labour Museum Werstas is located in the historical Finlayson cotton mill area. At Werstas, you can visit the Textile Industry Museum, the Steam Engine Museum as well as the Labour Museum's changing and permanent exhibitions.

The exhibitions at Werstas offer an overview of the history of the industrial era, worker population and civil society from different perspectives. The constantly refreshed exhibitions present interesting events from the history of social issues, workers’ culture, visual arts and politics. At Werstas, ordinary people take centre stage and their everyday lives, work and the differences between them are recounted in the form of memorable stories. Free admission for all visitors.

User Reviews

Mirage Sur (2 years ago)
An interesting museum of the industrial and social history of Tampere and many ways of the whole country. Take a guided tour and you'll understand what you see. Otherwise this is a tough to understand complex.

Petri Aho (2 years ago)
Quite nice place. We had Christmas party here and everything was arranged excellently.

Hertta Nurmio (2 years ago)
Great for people visiting Tampere and wanting to know more about the history (for free!) I love this museum.

Alice Picari (2 years ago)
Nice museum where to discover the 20th century in Finland

Wouter Mantel (2 years ago)
Varied museum with as showpiece a huge steam machine. Interesting machines and tools from times of revolution in Tampere and how it is related to Worldwide developments, like the use of steam cilinders and the light bulb. Moreover there was an exhibition hall about Finland during war time and temporary exhibitions.

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Photo from Flickr, copyright Frans.Sellies

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Kroměříž stands on the site of an earlier ford across the River Morava. The gardens and castle of Kroměříž are an exceptionally complete and well-preserved example of a European Baroque princely residence and its gardens and described as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The first residence on the site was founded by bishop Stanislas Thurzo in 1497. The building was in a Late Gothic style, with a modicum of Renaissance detail. During the Thirty Years' War, the castle was sacked by the Swedish army (1643).

It was not until 1664 that a bishop from the powerful Liechtenstein family charged architect Filiberto Lucchese with renovating the palace in a Baroque style. The chief monument of Lucchese's work in Kroměříž is the Pleasure Garden in front of the castle. Upon Lucchese's death in 1666, Giovanni Pietro Tencalla completed his work on the formal garden and had the palace rebuilt in a style reminiscent of the Turinese school to which he belonged.

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UNESCO lists the palace and garden among the World Heritage Sites. As the nomination dossier explains, 'the castle is a good but not outstanding example of a type of aristocratic or princely residence that has survived widely in Europe. The Pleasure Garden, by contrast, is a very rare and largely intact example of a Baroque garden'. Apart from the formal parterres there is also a less formal nineteenth-century English garden, which sustained damage during floods in 1997.

Interiors of the palace were extensively used by Miloš Forman as a stand-in for Vienna's Hofburg Imperial Palace during filming of Amadeus (1984), based on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who actually never visited Kroměříž. The main audience chamber was also used in the film Immortal Beloved (1994), in the piano concerto scene.

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