Museum Eliel

Museum Eliel offers experiences of and insights into the history and present day of North Karelia. The exhibitions at Eliel showcase the region’s diverse voices, breathtakingly beautiful nature and life through the ages.

With its refreshed brand, Museum Eliel continues the work that the North Karelian museum has been doing for over a hundred years.

The North Karelian museum was founded in 1917 to document the region’s folk culture. Over the decades the museum has gone through many forms and locations.

The museum’s first exhibition spaces opened in Joensuu City Hall in 1920. After the years spent at the City Hall, the museum moved in 1955 to Karjalatalo in Ilosaari, where it operated for the next four decades.

At the turn of the millennium the exhibition spaces moved to the heart of the city — to Carelicum on the edge of the Market Square — where the museum opened its galleries in 1998. The North Karelian Museum operated as North Karelian museum Hilma until December 2023.

Museum Eliel opened its doors to the public at Joensuu’s old City Hall in October 2025.