Bata Shoe Museum

A whole museum dedicated just to the footwear seems excessive at first. Then you wander through its galleries and by the end of the tour you realize that this is just a fraction of human ingenuity, diversity, and craft across cultures and ages. You marvel that how much more is out there that needs to be preserved before the great unification of human cultures tramples everything in its path.

Bata Shoe company was founded by Tomáš Baťa (which is pronounced as “Ba’Cha” in native Czech) in 1894 in an area of Austro-Hungarian Empire that now belongs to the Czech Republic. Before the second World war, the Bata family moved to Canada and since that time it is a Canadian owned company.

Bata was the first company to adopt mass production techniques in shoemaking and was thus able to expand rapidly all over the world. The company policy of setting up villages around its factories for workers has resulted in several Bata-villes all around the world. They have been given local names like Bata Pur in Pakistan, Bata Nagar in India, Batadrop in the Netherlands and so on. 

This museum is the brainchild of Mrs. Sonja Bata from the second generation of the Bata family. It is the largest museum of its kind in the world.

The exact replica of Ötzi the Iceman shoe. The 5,300-year-old corpse was discovered in a European glacier in 1991 with clothing and other belongings intact. Like the original shoe, this replica is made of animal skins and vegetable fibers with grass padding for insulation.

Walk like an Egyptian. Footwear from the ancient Egyptian pyramids and tombs.

Lavish footwear from 18th and 19th century India. High heels are certainly not a modern concept.

19th-century footwear from North Africa. The back quarters of these shoes are pressed down allowing for ease of removal before prayers.

Baroque and Rococo style shoes from 18th century Europe.

The golden shoe of an 18th-century Akan chief in the gold coast area of West Africa.

'Asagutsu' shoes of the Japanese Shinto priests. These are carved out of paulownia wood.

Simple yet practical cowhide sandals of Maasai tribesmen from Kenya.

The Jeremy Scott X Adidas golden sneakers take inspiration from the golden-winged sandals of the ancient Greek messenger god Hermes (2015).

A Space Boot from the Apollo Space program.