Museum Fünf Kontinente (Museum Five Continents)

The Museum Five Continents in Munich is a museum for Non-European artworks and objects of cultural value. It was renamed on September 9th 2014 and was known as Bavarian State Museum of Ethnology (German: Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde) before.

The collection was founded in 1868, but its history started much earlier. The first collectors of objects from outside Europe were the members of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Today the museum is the second largest in Germany, outnumbered only by Berlin, with a collection of 200,000 objects and an exhibition area of 4,500 square meters.

To the history

The building in Munich´s Maximilianstrasse, one of the city´s four royal avenues, was originally constructed in 1859-1865 for the Bavarian National Museum by Eduard Riedel adverse to the building of the Government of Upper Bavaria.

The collection was founded in 1868, but its history started much earlier. The first collectors of objects from outside Europe were the members of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Today the museum is the second largest in Germany, outnumbered only by Berlin, with a collection of 200.000 objects and an exhibition area of 4,500 square meters.

* Photo: By User:Mattes (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

* Text (excerpt) from Museum Five Continents from Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0]), List of the authors