This museum exists by accident. In the early 1990s a contemporary art museum was being built into the Rettig Palace on the river bank; the excavation for it hit medieval structures, the rescue dig grew, and what was going to be one museum opened in 1995 as two. Ars Nova is the contemporary art. Aboa Vetus is the hole in the ground, and it is the only archaeological museum in the country.
What is down there is the Convent Quarter (Luostarikortteli), a district of wealthy merchants and craftsmen who could afford to build in stone and brick when most of Turku was wood. The cellars date from the 14th and 15th centuries. The Convent Riverfront, one of the main streets of the medieval town, still runs through the museum area — you walk along a medieval street inside a building, which is a strange thing to be able to do anywhere.
The curatorial decision that makes it worth the ticket is that the remains were kept as they were found. Nothing has been tidied into a reconstruction. Later layers sit on top of earlier ones and were accepted as part of the display, so you are reading a section through six hundred years rather than looking at a model of one moment.
This is also the clearest answer in Turku to the question of where the medieval town went. The museum’s own account is blunt: after the Great Fire of 1827 the city was rebuilt to a new plan and the ruins of the medieval town were buried underground. Above ground almost nothing survives; below ground, this block does, because it was sealed under the new street level rather than cleared.
The finds on show are domestic and specific — fragments of the glazed ceramic tiles of stoves, splinters of expensive imported glass, animal bone from kitchen waste, and a gold ring somebody lost. The permanent exhibition Aboa Vetus – Old Turku was relaunched on 1 April 2025, alongside Bony Tales & Botanical Garden, which is built on the bone and plant evidence from the site.
There is a restaurant, Brunndeli, in the building, open the same hours as the museum.
