In the service of the universal cultural heritage – The new Ethnographic Museum has opened its doors in Budapest | Hungarian Courier
How did it start? Researching the past, we arrive in the year 1847 on the winding paths of time. Antal Reguly presented a collection of ninety-two pieces at the meeting of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. These objects did not come from the Hungarian peasantry, but from linguistic peoples. They then went to the National Museum, establishing its Ethnographic Repository. Twenty-five years later, John Xantus returned home from the Far East with a much larger collection of two thousand to five hundred copies. An exhibition of these objects was organized at the National Museum, and in 1872 Xantus was appointed the first “guardian” of the museum’s ethnography department. That’s when the Ethnographic Museum was born. Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago.
The strength and seriousness of the efforts at that time is shown by the fact that in 1870 Mór Jókai also spoke in Parliament to create an independent ethnographic collection: “It is imperative that the objects collected by Xantus in East Asia be . distribution to a separate department guard.
Because this is the class of our museum from which the public can learn not only science and enjoyment, but also practical lessons. ”
Director General Lajos Kemecsi quoted the sentences at the professional opening of the new Ethnographic Museum on May 25, emphasizing: Jókai’s request was only fulfilled now, one hundred and fifty years later, when the Ethnographic Museum finally moved into a modern building designed according to its own needs. For the first time in its history. We look forward to it forever. And the process of finding a home is now beginning.
What is this new home like at the gates of the City Park? A strange and very spectacular space, surprising at first sight, which attracts not only those interested in ethnography. The building designed by Marcel Ferencz is certainly one of, if not the most modern, special buildings in today’s Budapest, which can even become an icon. It has also recently won a prestigious international award,
it was first voted the best public building in Europe and then, as a continental winner, swept the recognition of the best in the world.
A building that combines the traditional and the contemporary (the façade is decorated with 21st century folk art motifs and wording); square where the city and the green belt meet; a place that can connect people. The roof of the building is a park or maybe a garden. It is a promenade for encounters and coexistence, and therefore a lookout point over the city, which offers a new, hitherto unknown perspective. As the architect dreamed, “It was not possible to draw a classic house on this site. I have designed a community space that responds to the challenges of a livable movement in a 21st century city that attracts audiences and thus involuntarily introduces it to the realm of culture. ”
Namely, a realm that preserves more than two hundred thousand objects and hundreds of thousands of photographs, drawings, manuscripts, sound materials and films. A significant part of the collection is now made up of Hungarian material. The real special feature of the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest is that it preserves the objects and documents of the cultures of peoples, Hungarian nationalities, neighboring peoples and distant peoples in the same institution as the objects and documents of the Hungarian people.
At the same time as the new museum building opened, three exhibitions opened: one as a temporary exhibition and two as a permanent exhibition section. The latter two are Zoom seven hundred and Ceramic space an ensemble of three thousand to five hundred objects. On the official website of the museum we read that the Ethnographic Museum has an incomprehensibly huge collection of Zoom in the exhibition space it can still be seen as a kind of ancient chaos. In contrast, a new permanent exhibition in the near future will let you know how to make order out of chaos through systematization and interpretation. Indeed, the Zoomas a Ceramic space it also demands a new kind of vision from the visitor, or rather freedom of gaze. It is good if the visitor has no expectations, no preliminary concepts, if he can let go of the previous museum experiences, if he can give himself completely freely to the spectacle, the new experiences.
Because museologists now do not give instructions, they do not guide with the help of inscriptions, but “let the visitor lose the objects, pictures, letters in the forest, so that he can then linger on some of the snatched examples, or perhaps see himself in the diversity of faces”.
In the freedom of the gaze, an object and a face can stand out from the “primordial chaos” in its permanence, but still in the unique mirror of the gaze on it, and behind it, connections and systems of relationships can unfold.
A whole new approach to objects in a completely modern space. A cultural cavalcade, an adventure in the universe of human culture.
It offers this in the new Ethnographic Museum. This is how he tries to go around and show, to focus on the universal mission of ethnography.
Academician Professor Attila Paládi-Kovács also touched on this issue in a nice summary of the professional opening. “We know ethnography is a national science for many. In fact, it is much more, as it examines the cultural heritage and the world of tradition of all humanity divided into peoples, the creative work of man, the origin of things, the birth of societies and culture. ” Ethnography and this is exactly the universality that introduces new exhibitions – orderly, systematically, or seemingly disordered, but offering many, five thousand objects (this in itself is many times the objects ever presented) and leaving it to the visitor to get closer to what he sees and what it looks like and what it keeps.
Title of the first temporary exhibition: We arrived. It is meant to express the desire of the statelessness of one and a half centuries and the temporary closure to find a final home. The symbol of the move is a chest that is now opening and items are being brought out of it to finally take their place not only in the warehouses but also in the exhibition space. Through more than a hundred objects (some of which have never been exhibited; half come from the Carpathian Basin and half from international material) we get a taste of the exceptional richness of the Ethnographic Museum’s collections. The exhibition does not organize according to geographical areas or peoples, but collects objects and documents from different peoples, different ages, spanning great geographical and temporal distances.
In addition to each of the twenty thematic units, we can read a detailed description of its history, its purpose, and its role in the order of the holidays or everyday life, as a result of the work of thirty museologists. Through objects, cultural realities, human situations, and answers to life’s challenges come to life.
THE Bread, cake, wine in a thematic unit, for example, I can see a beautiful grape press in Szekszárd, which combines religious traditions in a special way and gives a taste of the serenity of viticulture. The figure of the Virgin Mary appears on it with a pleading inscription for the shelter of sinners, beneath it St. Orbán, revered as the patron saint of the vineyards and vine-growers and pubs. Only a psalm parable “for wine drinkers” can be read on it.
One of the interesting objects of the unity arranged under the concept of a holiday is a truncated statue of the Madonna. It originates from Vitnyéd in today’s Győr-Moson-Sopron county, and its history clearly shows how former sacred objects become artefacts. The statue is made in the second half of the 18th century and depicts the Virgin Mary with Jesus on her left arm. In the middle of the 20th century, it was moved from the church to its attic, and from there it soon to a farmhouse, and after stripping itself of its role as a homestead, it finally became a museum object. Looking at the statue, I was reminded not only of the Mariazelli statue, to which the description refers, but also of its “younger copy,” the Smiling Mary of Oslo, close to Vitnyéd. Two shrines, the large and the small, were the target of the pilgrims of Rábaköz at that time, so it is no wonder that naive copies of the statues of worship seen and revered there appeared in their churches.
In the first temporary exhibition, we also gain an insight into the most exciting part of the museological work, the investigation into the history of the objects. This process requires hard, persistent research, a thorough knowledge of the literature, and therefore creativity in the search for analogies and in the search for traces of restoration.
The oldest object in the exhibition is a Mayan pottery made for ritual purposes sometime between the 6th and 9th centuries. The latest object is the Baja net, which was made in 2021 from new materials but using the old, traditional technique.
These two objects themselves carry many distant dimensions that are connected as a bridge between ethnography and the Ethnographic Museum.
In his opening speech, Attila Paládi-Kovács also quoted Zsigmond Bátky, the former director of the Ethnographic Museum, who wrote this as early as 1906: “ it will illustrate in its natural development, in a word, it will become a general museum of cultural history. ” The great mission of the new Ethnographic Museum is to make this vision a reality.
The first exhibitions lead promisingly along this path. The huge exterior and interior of the museum carry further promise. On the one hand, they offer free access to modern public spaces with a park, a lookout, a café, a restaurant, a museum shop, and free exhibition and museum pedagogical spaces. THE Ceramic spaceen too anyone can view the The Golden Age of Budapest also features an interactive exhibition focusing on a 55-square-foot city model. And all this will be expanded in the future with a cinema, ral, archival research service, other parts of the permanent exhibition in the collection, and children’s and youth exhibitions. Both those interested and the profession, ethnography and related companies, researchers, museologists, university students can find a home in the new Ethnographic Museum.
The atmosphere of the opening day of the professional can be best described in the words of joy. Colleagues, professionals were happy to arrive together, old acquaintances met and rejoiced in each other’s common cause, the success of common love, ethnography.
Finding a home is a long process. It is starting now. In spaces admired by modern Europe and even the world. The milieu is quite different, but the task and mission is given and unchanged: the service of universal human culture.
Author: Borsodi Henrietta
Photo: Zita Merényi
Hungarian Courier
A printed version of the writing was published in the June 12, 2022 issue of the New Man, in the Standard Cultural Supplement.