The most unusual museums in Amsterdam

Amsterdam is deservedly called the city of museums, because there are more than 400 museums and art galleries. The State Museum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank House Museum and the City Museum - this is an incomplete list of the most popular museums in the Dutch capital. However, there are other, smaller museums in Amsterdam, such as the museum of coffee, glasses, pianos, diamonds, cheese, beer, bags and many others. We offer you the strangest of them.

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Frolik Museum

1. The Frolik Museum houses an amazing collection of pathological artifacts, anomalous embryos, strange skulls and bones and other anatomical anomalies, brought together by Gerard Frolik, one of the greatest Dutch scientists in history.

2. Willem Frolik was a pioneer in the field of teratology - the science of deformities. It was a fairly popular discipline among 18th and 19th century scholars. Willem published several monographs on the subject and brought together many exhibits.

3. After Frolik's death, a group of Dutch citizens bought the collection and handed it over to the city authorities for auction. Later, an amazing selection ended up in the vaults of the University of Amsterdam.

4. Today, the Frolik Museum houses exhibits from other collections, which were added here during more than a century of the museum's existence.

Torture Museum

5. The Torture Museum is dedicated to the history of human cruelty. The exhibits are displayed in a labyrinth of small, dark rooms, creating a dark and eerie atmosphere.

6. In the museum you can see a lot of interesting devices - from such famous items as the guillotine to less famous ones, such as the infamous flute. The museum also features a skull crusher, a Judas chair, wheeling machines, etc.

7. Some of the exhibits are unique and ancient, but there are also modern reconstructions based on models from old books and texts. Some exhibits are behind glass, but many can be touched.

Sex Museum

8. The Sex Museum is located next to Amsterdam Central Station and attracts over 500,000 visitors every year. The museum houses a very interesting collection of books about human sexual relations: paintings, photographs, figurines, plates and many other items. Here you can see a plaster figure of Venus at the entrance and a full-length wax statue of Mata Hari, as well as Marilyn Monroe. From invisible speakers, the sounds of a steam engine are constantly heard, mixed with exciting female moans.

Museum of anasha, marijuana and hemp

9. This museum, as you may have guessed, is dedicated to hemp and its uses. Museum visitors are offered information about the historical and modern uses of cannabis for medical, religious and cultural purposes.

10. The museum also explains how hemp can be used for agricultural and industrial purposes, such as tailoring and making accessories.

11. The museum has a "garden" of live cannabis in various stages of growth, as well as a collection of bulbulators and mouthpieces, an 1836 Dutch hemp Bible, and many other items. The museum also has works of art, including the painting by David Teniers the Younger "Peasants Smoking Weed » (1660).

Tattoo Museum

12. The Tattoo Museum opened in Amsterdam in November 2011. It is dedicated to the history of tattoo art and contains exhibits from all over the world, including needles, old signs, photographs, finished tattoo designs and freak show posters.

13. The museum also has some creepy exhibits - tattoos made, for example, on pig or human skin. For example, there is a piece of skin taken from the armpit of a whaler of the 19th century, which depicts a portrait of his beloved and Christ. The museum has more than 40,000 exhibits. It was founded by Henk Schiffmacher, who is still its manager.

14. Exhibitions are organized by continents and regions - Africa, America, Oceania, Asia. In addition, the museum presents the history of tattoos and their traditions in different subcultures of society - prison tattoos, army, naval, prostitute tattoos, etc. Famous tattoo artists have not bypassed the attention here either.

cat cabinet

15. The cat cabinet is entirely devoted, as you already understood, to cats. The museum was founded in 1990 by William Meyer, a wealthy Dutchman who wanted to preserve the memory of his cat Tom in this way. The museum displays paintings, drawings, sculptures and other works by Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Corneille and others. Five cats also live on the territory of the museum.

Funeral Museum

16. The Dutch Burial Museum opened in 2007 and is entirely dedicated to the culture of burial in the Netherlands as well as the history of burial. A wide variety of coffins can be found here, including authentic 19th-century ceremonial carriages. Among the exhibits are hearses, obituaries, mourning outfits and memorial services. The museum is also dedicated to historical burial customs, from royal ceremonies to rural burials, that have not changed even over the centuries.