František Řehoř was born on December 6, 1857, in the village of Stěžery, near Hradec Králové. In 1877, his family decided to try their luck in the Galician village of Volkiv, near Lviv. Řehoř was so impressed by the local atmosphere that he began to intensively study and document Galician culture. In a letter from 1878, he contacted Vojta Náprstek and offered his collections from the Galicia region to the Czech Industrial Museum. Náprstek and his wife Josefa accepted his offer, which marked the beginning of their long-lasting cooperation. Řehoř created his collections carefully and systematically and kept thorough written and photographic records. In the 1940s, the Galician Collection became part of the collections of the Ethnographic Department of the National Museum. 

The collection displays artistically valuable artifacts from church interiors in addition to everyday items. The clothing and personal items category includes, for example, a lady’s walking stick, men’s traditional axes (“Bartka”, “Kelep/Kelef”), a pipe, and objects linked with social and religious status (rosary, pectoral cross). The category of housewares and household equipment includes furniture and household items, such as dishes and various utensils for cooking and food storage, but it also includes interior decorations, i. e. wooden objects of a decorative and representative nature. The typological subgroup of housewares includes the following types of items: dishes, kitchen utensils, clothing care products and writing implements. Housewares also include items related to crafts: spindles, glove knitting molds, bobbins, crochet hooks, etc. There are also agricultural tools and transport equipment, such as wooden saddles for transporting luggage (“Tarnycja”), etc.  

Ceremonial items are further subdivided into wedding, Easter, Christmas and commemorative attributes. These feature significant calendar events (Christmas, Easter) and family ceremonies (weddings, funerals). The oldest wood-carved items date back to the 18^th century. They are quite rare, directly associated with the life and faith of mountain dwellers; icon crosses, which had a special place in the holy corner (“Pokut”) inside the houses of Galician Hutsuls. The collection items represent all the main woodworking techniques: carpentry, joinery, woodturning, cooperage and woodcarving, and types of decorations: chiseling, profiling, carving, inlaying, incrustation, burning and painting. The main ornamental motifs are notches, six-pointed rosettes, stars, “suns,” “cupola,” diamonds with crosses, “tears,” fine geometric shapes, wavy lines (“snake”), etc.