A museum that reconnects you with your childhood
Text Mark Taylor Photos Sergei Trofimov
Over 5000 people visited the Pram Museum in 2023.
The idyllic village of Käru in Järvamaa is an apt home for the Käru Museum. Translated into English Käru means pram, but in Estonian it can also be a wheelbarrow, or any kind of cart or carriage.
The Pram Museum in Käru takes you on a journey through the last 200 years of social history via an item we often throw away or hand to the next person when our kids outgrow it. It is this unsentimental approach to this item that means old prams are a rare commodity.
At the Pram Museum, you will find examples from the 19th century from around Europe, to 20th century and soviet era prams made in Estonia.
Many of the prams in the museum come with stories of the families that used them, such as a pram made in Norway for Estonian triplets to the poignant story of a man who “donated a pram he used with his daughters who both sadly died on the ferry Estonia,” shared museum guide Kaja Vilipus.
Hundreds of prams as well as children’s toys and items can be seen in the two old Käru train station buildings. There is also a third newly renovated building near the station where there is a small café downstairs and rooms upstairs set in different decades.
The power of the museum is in connecting people with their childhoods and dearest memories through the items they had. The emotions these items invoke can bring people to tears, as museum co-founder Sergei Trofimov, explains.
“The president’s wife visited the museum on museum night… She was in the 1930’s room crying as she had found the exact bed used by her grandmother.”
Downstairs in the same building, you will also find a room where you can try on clothes from different eras. “Sometimes visitors spend up to an hour in here,” Trofimov adds.
As well as being open for individual tourists each Saturday and Sunday, the museum is also open during the week for groups. It is possible to have your retirement party, birthday party, and even your bachelor party at the museum. The latter with a series of activities the groom might expect to encounter in married life.
You can learn more about the Pram Museum on its official website.
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