The re-opening Museum of Ethnography in Budapest has celebrated its 150th anniversary at the beginning of March. Its foundation’s date is symbolic: it marks the day when the renowned natural history collector János Xántus was appointed head of the Ethnographic Department of the Hungarian National Museum.
The Museum of Ethnography in Budapest is one of Europe’s most important professional museums and, thanks to its new building, one of the world’s most modern ethnographic institutions. Besides the nearly 225,000 ethnographic objects, its collection preserves unique photographs, manuscripts, folk music and film recordings. In addition to the artifacts of Hungarian folk culture, it also houses the most extensive ethnographic collection of the region, representing the diverse cultures of people from distant continents, showing the various manifestations of everyday life and social relations from the 17th century to the present day. Since the turn of the millennium, the institution has become one of the most important Hungarian centers for the renewal of ethnographic museology, with an emphasis on the documentation of contemporary social phenomena and the digitization of the existing artifact collection.
Source: Press Release