The Museum of Poetry (Muzeul Poeziei) is a small three-room museum inside the House of Museums (Casa Muzeelor) in Iași, presenting poetry through visual art and large-scale installations rather than a conventional literary exhibition. Created by visual artist Ion Barbu, the museum uses objects, text, painting, and sculpture to turn poems and poetic ideas into physical displays.
One installation, The Poets’ Footsteps, runs through all three rooms using pairs of shoes donated by contemporary Romanian poets alongside imagined footwear for classical poets and literary characters. Elsewhere, bottles contain handwritten poems signed by contemporary writers, while a group of personalized typewriters forms Letters to the Good Lord, each dedicated to a Romanian poet.
The displays continue with Haute Couture / Haute Culture, where mannequins wear clothing painted with verses, and Stones for My Temple, which combines painted stones into lines drawn from contemporary poetry. Barbu’s own “picto-poems” cover the walls, mixing words and images throughout the exhibition.
The museum opened with the House of Museums in 2021 and was conceived specifically for this building as a playful, contemporary exploration of what poetry can become outside the printed page.
The museum is administered by the National Museum of Romanian Literature Iași, and is one of five museums inside the House of Museums. It can be visited with an individual ticket, or with a combined ticket for all five.
