The beginnings of museology in Říčany are connected with the National Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition held in Prague in 1895. The year before (1894) a “preparatory” exhibition of collected artefacts documenting local culture and nature had already taken place here and selected items were then exhibited the following year in Prague. The initiators of the Říčany exhibition and the museum industry here in general were two local teachers: Alois Mudruňka and Růžena Klímová. Mudruňka later became the museum manager. The museum was officially founded in 1908 and started to develop significantly in 1911. The museum also included a “natural history section-geography” headed by Václav Zázvorka.
From the start, the museum struggled with a lack of suitable space for storing collections and for holding exhibitions. The collections had to be moved frequently and were temporarily stored, for example, in the rectory and at the town hall. The matter was solved in 1940 when the benefactress Růžena Klímová bequeathed her villa Růženka for the needs of the museum. It was opened to the public in 1949, and the museum has been there ever since.
In the 1950s the Říčany Museum received the collections of several dissolved museums in the area (Pyšely, Uhříněves, Nedvězí). In the 1960s, natural history collections contained thousands of specimens of beetles and butterflies, hundreds of herbarium items, a mammoth tusk and molar, and skin grafts (i.e., taxidermy) of vertebrates. The museum staff actively expanded the collections and also published works on the natural history of the region. They were also able to acquire a building in nearby Jažlovice, which still serves as a depository today.
A new chapter in the history of the museum began in 2008, when Jakub Halaš, a naturalist and educator, became the director. The museum has become a centre of environmental activities with a broad programme and an educational geopark and botanical trail have been established. The collection of natural history artefacts (and other objects) has been carefully catalogued and is still occasionally extended. The written works from the estate of local researchers collected here, including natural history studies, are also of great value.
