Sirogojno
An open-air museum, and the sweaters Vogue made catalogues for
- When to go
- October 12° · 7 rainy days
- Per day
- €price 1 of 5
- How many days
- ½days
- For you
- 6 questions →
- Nearest airport
- 58 km Kraljevo
- Right now
Sirogojno is half a day from Zlatibor: the Staro Selo open-air museum has some fifty buildings brought from the surrounding Zlatibor villages and set out over five hectares. The Sirogojno sweater was born in the same village from 1962, so you see both how people lived and what fashion made of it.
The log buildings began to be moved and reassembled in 1980, and the project was carried through by the same woman who created the sweater — Dobrila Vasiljević-Smiljanić. The display is not a collection of single houses but two complete homesteads, a herdsmen's camp, a farm section, craft workshops and a village classroom, and the museum also has a tavern and lodgings, so you can stay the night in Sirogojno.
In November 1962 Dobrila Smiljanić started hand-knitted clothing within the farmers' cooperative: she drew the patterns and motifs, stylised from the Zlatibor landscape, and women from the village and its hamlets knitted them. Through the 1970s and 1980s Vogue and the Prada fashion house produced the catalogues for her collections, and the coarse Zlatibor wool was in time replaced by softer imported wool from Iceland and Australia.
Guides for Sirogojno
Shorter, practical pages for one concrete question each — how many days, how much money, where to sleep, where to escape the city.
Sirogojno in 1 day
→Half a day from Zlatibor: two homesteads, a herdsmen's camp, the workshops and the church, in order through the same…
What to see in Sirogojno
The first homestead
A house with its vajat cabins, a dairy hut, a bread oven, a barn, a corn crib and a hen house — every outbuilding of a Zlatibor farmyard.
€2.60
The second homestead
A two-part Zlatibor house under a steep four-sided roof, ringed by vajat cabins where the young married couples of the extended family slept, a tobacco store, a cabin with a hidden storeroom, beehives and a root cellar.
€2.60
The herdsmen's camp
The mountain quarters of herdsmen who spent their time with the livestock: two huts, a sheepfold, a shelter and a kućer — a bed on runners, so the herdsman could stay beside his flock.
€2.60
The craft workshops
Cooper's, potter's, blacksmith's and basket-maker's workshops, with a programme for keeping the traditional crafts alive.
€2.60
The Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul
From 1764, founded by the archpriest Georgije Cmiljanić. The iconostasis is Simeon Lazović's first signed work: his name and the year 1764 are on the south leaf of the royal doors, beside the Virgin of the Annunciation.
€2.60
Two things you probably did not know
Sweaters from Sirogojno were sold in New York, Paris and Tokyo from the nineteen sixties on. The ethnologist Dobrila Smiljanic gathered the village knitters into a cooperative, and their work ended up on fashion runways.
The Old Village museum is not a reconstruction: the houses are real, from the nineteenth century, taken apart in villages around Zlatibor and put back together here. Some of them can still be rented for the night.
Ready for Sirogojno?
Within reach from here
Places sorted by straight-line distance from Sirogojno — day trips or weekends.
Serbia
→The north an hour away by train, the mountains three or four by car — Serbia divides by the time you have
Montenegro
→The Bay, the riviera or Ulcinj for the sea, Durmitor for July — choose the coast by its beaches and the north by the month
Greece
→The north by road, the Cyclades by ferry, Rhodes by air — pick the region first and the island second
All 277 places we write about sit on one page — narrow them down by continent, country, price or what you are travelling for.
Within reach from here: Zlatibor, Mokra Gora and Ovčar-Kablar Gorge
See how much of that actually suits you — or pin Sirogojno if you have been.
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