The Museum of Ethnography in Mogilev was opened in 1981 as a branch of the Mogilev Regional Museum. The museum is located in a wooden house built in the early twentieth century, and its halls cover an area of 100 square meters in which household items and peasant clothing of the Mogilev province from the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, and samples of decorative art of the second half of the twentieth century are presented. In 1996, it was decided to reorganize and establish a museum of rural and urban life on an area of 700 square meters near the original museum.