Ethnographic Museum of Oltenia

The collection is good; the building is the exhibit.

This is Casa Băniei, the oldest building in Craiova and the former residence of the Ban of Oltenia — the office that governed everything west of the Olt, whose holder ranked first among the boyars of Wallachia, immediately after the ruling prince. In a city whose visible fabric is almost entirely of the decades around 1900, this is the one structure that predates the grain money by centuries. The Bănia sets out what that office was and why Oltenia consequently behaves like a place rather than a compass bearing.

Inside, the Ethnographic Museum of Oltenia, and the pairing is a good one: the house is the region's administrative memory and the collection is its material one. What to look for — regional costume and embroidery, which in Romania is genuinely regional; Horezu pottery, whose craft has been on UNESCO's intangible heritage list since 2012 and whose workshops are still working 113 km north-east; the *țest*, the earthenware bell bread is baked under; and Gorj woodwork, the vernacular tradition Brâncuși grew up inside and whose geometry turns up, stacked fifteen times, in the Infinite Column.

That last connection is the reason to come here *before* Târgu Jiu rather than after. The full guide — and telephone first, because no museum in this city publishes a dependable timetable.